Category: Linux

Dapper, Edgy And Fedora

Following my problematic and failed upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, I thought I'd use the opportunity to try out Fedora Core 6 in the hope that the Ubuntu installation would get fixed and I could return to it. So, I got my Fedora install CD - no Live CD, just a straight install - booted it up and followed the instructions. I did once use Fedora Core 4, but became frustrated because programs didn't seem to install very easily and I had used Ubuntu before, so I just went back to using Ubuntu.

Anyway, I followed the install process, which I must say is very simple. The advantage of an install CD is that it installs the bare minimum, whereas a Live CD which you install from installs other things - I'll come back to that, though. It was probably the simplest install CD I've seen, bar the Ubuntu text install CD. It has an added benefit over the Ubuntu CD though - you have absolute control over everything you wish to install before it starts, should you so wish. I like that :)

The trouble was with installing, though. As it installed, it came up with a conflict - with file names. Thus, the install failed and I had to reboot. However, I wasn't going to hold this against Fedora - the hard disk I was installing to can be a little dodgy occassionally, so it could have been a problem with this rather than with Fedora. Anyway, I rebooted and started again, this time just selecting all the default options. Success! It installed fine and asked me to reboot. So I did - but there was a problem. When GRUB appeared, there was no mention of Fedora. It appears that Fedora just didn't set up the boot loaded. I booted from the other disk to see if it was installed there, but there was no boot loader there.

Fine, I thought. I'll load up Knoppix or the Ubuntu Live CD, and find out the information I need to set up GRUB myself - except when I did, there was no mention of the partition. It had been set up as a logical volume and I had no idea how to access it. So, I cut my losses, loaded the Edgy Live CD and booted that, wiping the Fedora disk again and installing Edgy. The install went perfectly, although I did need to download about 600Mb of files.

Oh, then there was one more problem - the hard drive started playing up again. So... I went out this evening, leaving my PC to make a tarball of everything except my /home directory. It's 1.8Gb large, down from 6Gb uncompressed, and tomorrow, I can try to extract it to my old Ubuntu partition. We'll see if it works. I've not tried it before and I'm only taking a wild stab at how to do it, so it'll be interesting to see.

Using Cron

Following my previous post about outputting RSS feeds to XHTML, I spent today doing two things: firstly, I worked at formatting the output to my page so that it displays as I like, which was quite easy. I wanted two columns, so I floated one column to the left and one to the right - nice and simple. I then fixed the overall width for the two columns and their height - which proves tricky to judge when you want the description of each item and not just the total! I put a fixed height of 500 pixels on the div tags, but the output sometimes exceeded this on some feeds. I vcan get round this in one of two ways: firstly, only use the title, or secondly, limit the character output - but that's for another day.

I then looked at the slightly harder part - automating the rebuilding of the feed output - as I believe is the case with Planet Jedimoose. I had found details of how to do this already. In the script I want to execute:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

And in Cron:

0 11 * * * /path/to/file.php >/dev/null 2>&1

The block of 5 numbers/asterisks denoting that the script be run on the hour, at 11 o'clock, every day, of every week, of every month. Unfortunately, I couldn't get this to work, so I emailed the web hosting company, who told me that I needed this in Cron:

30 18 * * * /usr/local/bin/php -qf

/home/busyscot/public_html/test/magpierss/jedimoose_rss.php

>/dev/null 2>&1

Ignore the change in time the script would run (in this case, 18:30 every day) - I was merely testing it at various intervals, and I just updated the time to approximately 2 minutes after I'd finished editing each time! Unfortunately, this didn't seem to work either, and no output from Cron had made its way into my email inbox; thus, I decided I needed to do some Googling. I found a nice resource which told me that what I needed to do depended upon whether my php was installed as an Apache module, or as compiled CGI. For compiled CGI, it said to do this:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

That would be in the executable file, and then this in Cron:

* * * * * php /path/to/your/cron.php

That would execute the file every minute of every day. So, I modified it to this:

30 * * * * php /path/to/your/cron.php

0 * * * * php /path/to/your/cron.php

It then told me to execute a shell command, which I ignored as I don't have shell access. It then stated that if you have php installed as an Apache module, you have to do something else to work.

Well, the above Cron command works - but phpinfo() shows that I have php installed as an Apache module - so I guess it works either way (surely you can't have both installed, can you?)!

Wanted - Tenacity

I posted in April about troubles upgrading Ubuntu to Dapper and, a couple of days ago, I posted about finding a new tool to upgrade Ubuntu automatically. Well, I am pleased to say that I recieved an email today from one of Ubuntu's mailing list announcing the pre-release beta candidate for Ubuntu 6.06 - and the one click upgrade is there to use :)

Ok, it's more than one click, but all you have to do is click 'ok', 'yes', and 'upgrade'. Hopefully it will work nicely, unlike my previous experiences. The only downside - it's an 842Mb download, with 642 updates. I need to go out for the good part of a day having already had it going overnight to do that. So, I'm going to hold it off for a few days, methinks. I'll keep you posted about how it goes when it's -done though :)

If you want to look at some screenshots of the new release, go to the Dapper Beta page on the Ubuntu Wiki. It's looking extremely nice - and that's high praise from me!

Features of the new release:

Like I said, it's looking good. I can't wait to get my hands on it - but I haven't the time to install it at the moment - hopefully I'll be able to install it in the next week or so though. Maybe Wednesday will be a good day, since I'll be out.

Gwenview - Photo Resizing In Linux

Until now, if I've wanted to resize lots of photos on my computer, I've needed to boot in to Windows to do the job. I could, of course, resize them all in something like the GIMP, but I'd have to do them one-by-one, which, when you're doing about 120, and you need to resize each photo twice, just isn't feasible. So, off I'd go in to Windows, and use a program called 'Visualiser Photo Resize' (if you're looking for it, try downloads.com for 'photo resize', I don't think it's available anywhere else - not that I know of, anyway).

Anyway, I thought I'd have a look around, and I found a few programs to do the trick. One is KimDaBa, another is Gwenview. They're very similar and both very good. They are designed for KDE rather than GNOME, but that's no real problem. To use the batch resizing, you need the 'kdegraphics' package on Ubuntu, and then it just rocks and rolls!

As a bonus, you can also edit photos to include a border, so you can do a batch edit and add, say, a 1 pixel border to every photograph. Watch out for the photos gracing the photo gallery sometime before October (the current gallery is only work in progress - it WILL change - I need the time to work on it though).

Anyhow, it's another area where Linux replaces Windows nicely. There's really not much that I ever need to use Windows for. I can only think of two reasons:

So what's your excuse? I'm have more demanding software requirements of my PC than most of you reading this. If I can do it... ;)

Noelinho's Back Using Breezy Badger

Just before I start what I'm actually meant to be posting about, I found a neat little program to install on Ubuntu earlier called 'Blog Entry Poster' which is meant to be compatible with WordPress - I tried to post using it, but it didn't work. It would be handy if it worked, though it can't do categories - it would be great to be able to post via my desktop with no browser. Of course, I can always post by email to WordPress...but I don't. Anyway....

It's a while since I've used Ubuntu actually. I'll admit it, when I had endless problems upgrading to Dapper Drake, and then with my fresh install of Breezy, the sheer amount of work I had to do meant Linux had to take a back seat whilst I used Windows XP to get my work done. However, I no longer need my PC for University work (I don't need it during the exam period - paper has everything I need) until October, so I am free to do what I'm so good at - breaking software (and salvaging the pieces as an afterthought).

You may remember that I had problems with lock-ups in Breezy Badger. I thought I had a graphics card problem. I didn't. I thought it was the power lead. It wasn't. I thought it was the PSU. It wasn't (but the new one blew up, thankfully not taking the whoel of the PC with it). I thought it was the memory. It wasn't - not completely anyway, though the PSU had gone a long way to wrecking my nice RAM.

So, what was the problem? I do believe I now know. My new graphics card didn't like the generic Linux drivers. With nVidia's binary drivers, I'm having no problems today. Evidently, the generic drivers just aren't compatible with my nice new card. It took 4 months to work it out. Computers.... ;)

Actually, even that's a sidetrack of what I really want to talk about. What I really want to talk about is something I find quite exciting, which I found on Planet Ubuntu today. It's about upgrading Ubuntu. The link has the full article, with helpful screenshots, but the upshot of it is this - it's going to be potentially easier to upgrade Ubuntu. Upgrading Ubuntu, at the moment at least, involves editing a configuration file and then typing a couple of commands in to the terminal. It's not difficult, but it's not worked for me yet. This would just add a button that appears when a new release is ready. It tkaes away the possibility that you can do a bodged upgrade - though it won't necessarily mean it is perfect. It should also help less technically proficient people too :)

Honestly, you might not be excited about it, but I happen to think it's one of those small little things that is actually very useful. If people can see upgrading should be as easy as clicking upgrade, that can only be a good thing!

Ubuntu Linux - The Healthy Choice

I've been playing around with Linux for about 3 years now, although it's only in the last year or so that it has actually appeared as an integral part of my desktop. However, the more I use Linux, the more frustrating Windows becomes whenever I move away from Linux to use Windows. Quite simply, Linux, overall, is better. It makes more common sense. It runs faster. It is definitely more stable (except when you have problems with your memory). It looks cleaner. It's more versatile for what I want to do.

In fact, there is very little that I want to do that Linux doesn't do. Games are one thing, but I don't get much time for games generally. It's not a huge problem. Playing media files can sometimes be an issue, but it usually copes. There can be a few problems though. Hardware-wise, it's not too bad. Occasional disagreement with memory causes a lock-up, but that's not the fault of Linux, that's the fault of a PSU blowing holes in my RAM. The nVidia drivers (when I get them installed) work fine, though my card is slightly too new to be recognised, and I can't therefore, change all my speed settings on the card. However, considering I don't really play games on Linux, it's no real issue. My USB devices work fairly well - USB 2.0 is supported. My USB headset is supported, though the volume control of the chord doesn't work. It's not exactly life-threatening. So, aside from games and the occasional media playback issue, there's nothing really wrong with Linux.

So, once you've got past the potential 'it doesn't do what I want' problems, there's how it does them, and whether it does them well. Like I said, graphically I prefer Linux. Of all the Linux distributions I have tried, Ubuntu is by far the most appealing to me. I prefer GNOME to KDE any day of the week - it looks cleaner, more conservative, more integrated. Some people don't like the 'Human' theme that comes with Ubuntu - I quite like it.

General Computer Usage

Multiple desktops are something which are a must for someone like me. When I am working, I invariably have multiple windows open. If I'm doing anything to do with websites, I'll have my usual windows open - Firefox, my web browser; Thunderbird, my email client; GAIM, my instant messenger client; my FTP client (Filezilla on Windows, gFTP on Ubuntu); a media player (Windows Media Player on Windows - no matter what people say about it, I've never found a windows application that is better for playing media personally, though iTunes is good for podcasts, not that there are many good ones around to be honest), Rhythmbox on Ubuntu. That's 5 applications already, before I'm editing. When I'm editing, I'll have a text editor open, like gedit (Ubuntu) or Notepad2 (Windows - far better than Notepad). If I'm copying and pasting, I quite often use Abiword too (if in Ubuntu). That's quite a few applications open at once. To have them all on one window is possible, but not the most practical solution.

Multiple Desktops

Therefore, multiple desktops are a must. Now, this can be done on Windows. One of the reasons I buy nVidia graphics cards, if you take out Linux support, is because of their support for such desktops with an application called nView. You create as many desktops as you like, and you flick between them, either by a taskbar, or by keyboard shortcuts. Problem one - the taskbar mucks up your desktop icons. Problem two - keyboard shortcuts are slow for this purpose - say you have 6 desktops - you can only cycle them one by one, you can't cycle straight to a particular desktop (even if you could, you'd have to know the shortcut for that particular desktop, and you'd have to have 6 shortcuts that didn't interfere with any shortcuts you already had for any program!). It's much easier to have the desktops listed at the bottom of the screen, with their own identifiable label, which you can scroll using the mouse in a fraction of a second. That's what Linux does. It saves huge amounts of time with my work.

Comparing Applications

So, laying out my applications is easier (yes, I took about 300 words, and summed it up in 7. Sorry), but what about the applications themselves? Are they any good? Well, actually, they aren't all that different. Which programs do I use the most? GAIM is open most of the time, unless I'm really busy. Firefox is open all day - although it gets closed and reopened every few hours because it does gradually eat my memory. Thunderbird is open too. All three of these applications are used in both Ubuntu and Windows. Moreover, I also use the same extensions (though a couple are slightly different versions).

My text editors are hardly different. In Windows, I use Notepad2, available on the Open CD. It's very good, highly recommended. On Ubuntu, I use gedit. But let's face it, a simple text editor isn't going to be radically different. Moving up, there's office applications. I don't use Microsoft Office, I use OpenOffice. I much prefer it, and it has functions that I use constantly that Microsoft Office just doesn't have - like PDF exportation. I also use Abiword, which suffices for almost all word documents. Both are available on both operating systems. When it comes down to media, however, there is a big difference. You can't using Windows Media Player (duh!). However, Ubuntu comes with the fantastic application that is Rhythmbox. Now, you do have to convert all your music to Ogg Vorbis, but that really shouldn't be a big problem. After all, you can download plug-ins that make Windows Media Player play Ogg Vorbis, and you can buy MP3 players that play this media type too. The joys of open formats! Granted, the application doesn't look as good as Windows Media Player, but it does the job just as well, and please, don't tell me you actually watch the visualisations, do you? For music streams online, there is the wonderful Streamtuner, with mplayer and Totem for playing DVDs. All of them do a wonderful job.

On to imaging and you guessed it, the program I use on Windows and Ubuntu is the same - GIMP. Oh, and it loads faster on Ubuntu than Windows (as does OpenOffice now I come to think of it). It works in exactly the same way. But it is more stable. The Windows version does have a tendency to crash when utilising certain modules.

In fact, when it comes down to comparing applications, there is only one area where Windows comes out on top: FTP. I prefer Filezilla over gFTP. I'm not a massive fan of the gFTP interface and Filezilla supports dragging and dropping much better. Filezilla is the one application I will reboot for - if I'm spending all day on website stuff and I know I'll be using ftp frequently, I will boot in to Windows. It just saves time. But it's the only application that I'll do that for.

So, anything else I use on Windows that I also use on Ubuntu? Why, since you mention it, yes! Audacity (for sound recording, very good little application). I think that does it for comparing applications - basically, moving to Linux hasn't meant that I've needed to lose any of my programs. Far from it. I have more programs installed on Ubuntu than I could ever have on Windows.

Stability and Performance

This is something I like. A lot. Ubuntu is generally very stable. I've only had a few problems with a fully working system - and most of them were with dodgy RAM. It doesn't normally crash for no reason. Applications don't crash too often either. When they do, a prompt comes up asking if you want to restart it immediately. You don't have endless pop-ups appear asking if you want to send Linus Torvalds a bug report that, let's face it, wouldn't get read anyway. Imagine if someone at Microsoft read every one of the bug reports I could have sent them. That'd be a full time job.

It's not just this, though. One important thing, for me, is that Ubuntu doesn't steal your CPU when you aren't looking. If I leave my PC for a few minutes, Windows tries to hijack my CPU by running background tasks for half of China, running anti-virus checks, spyware checks, downloading 60 billion Windows fixes for crap code. I woke up this morning and I could hear my PC whirring away at what sounded like a rather arduous task. When you wake up to a Ubuntu PC, it's quiet. It makes it so much more responsive. Imagine trying to open OpenOffice and the GIMP under a Windows machine that's processing 10 things in the background. That's going to be slow - and they open slowly to begin with. Under Ubuntu, because the CPU isn't cluttered, they'll open much faster. That's what I want. Nice. Performance is also enhanced by other things. I've used this illustration before, I know. But you probably didn't read it anyway. You want your desktop background to change automatically. Say, every 2 hours. In Windows, you download Webshots. It does the job, but it uses up 50Mb of RAM, 3% of your CPU, etc.. What's more, it uses that constantly, all the time the PC is turned on. What a waste. The Linux way - option 1 - put a script on your desktop that changes the wallpaper. Click it, and the wallpaper changes. Option 2: same as above, except the script runs as a cron job. Can't write the script? They're not hard to get hold of on the internet. Efficiency. That's what I'm after.

Closing Thoughts

So, after that glowing appraisal of Ubuntu, shall I tell you a secret? I wrote this whole post in Windows... This is Noelinho's problem, you see. He's fantastic at breaking software. It's like this: people come to me complaining that their PC doesn't work. I fix it and make it work again. How do I do this? I've got a PhD in breaking software. You don't learn to fix things without experimentation and breaking! No matter what I use, I'll make it break eventually. It's just me. I love playing. But for most people, people who just want their PC to work and aren't intent on trying out 50 new programs a day, distributions like Ubuntu will just work. You really should try it. Oh, wait. Only mrBen is actually left reading this...

Anyway, why did I write this? I've written similar things before. Well, having suffered a week without Ubuntu, I miss it. Windows doesn't make sense the way it used to. I constantly think 'but it'd be so much easier if it worked like this...' - and it would! I thought for a long time that, as a power user on Windows, I'd not get on with Linux. There'd be too many customisations that I'd lose. But I haven't. They just run a little differently. I've gained much from using Ubuntu. I recommend it not as a cheapskate geek who just loves to be different and show off with things that other people can't use, but because there's less stress involved, it's simpler, it does everything (gaming aside) that I need, and means that I can spend more time using my PC than setting it up. Though I should say, I'm just about to reinstall Ubuntu now...

(Tip: Always think before upgrading when you have a couple of thousand applications installed. Problem 1 - you can't actually remember what was installed. Problem 2 - the unexpected can always happen.)

Oh, and another thing - installing programs is far easier than under Windows. Really.)

Ubuntu Linux And Gadget Support

You may have seen this article on NewForge about Ubuntu Linux and gadgets, comparing support for gadgets betwwen Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.

Linux having comparable support for hardware to Windows? You probably wouldn't think so. However, the article asks the question anyway, looking at:

The result was this: on Windows XP, you had to wait until the drivers were installed. For one camera, the drivers appear to have been available for a local install. For the second, an installation driver was required. However, Ubuntu recognised both cameras straight away and already had the drivers installed. The only required action was to turn the cameras on. When I got my new digital camera, I also found that Ubuntu needed not bother to install anything - it just worked, whereas Windows XP needed to install drivers - for a camera that only needed a mass storage driver, not a set of specialised drivers for the camera.

The printer was a slightly different story. Windows XP installed via a 'large application package' - but installed without any real hitches. For Ubuntu, a package called HPLIP was installed, and seemed to work well for printing and copying, but not so good for scanning.

The rest of the article talks about using software related to this hardware, but I shall ignore it as it seems unnecessarily biased against Windows XP. Windows has enough shortfalls, there's really no need to skew an article to reflect Windows badly...

Apart from gaming, USB hardware support in Linux was about the only issue I had with Linux. However, I have been rather impressed by how much support there is for it. If only I wasn't so attached to my gaming, I could perform a little experiment on my second hard drive to see if it really can survive 50G's of force like it says on the label. I dare say it can't - well, no, it just plain _can't_ - but I'd have good fun watching it smash into a billion pieces under the impact :)

Interesting post path, don't you think? Hardware support in an OS - - > smashing a hard disk to pieces.

Noelinho - the missing link between unrelated thoughts :)

More On Breezy Badger

Well, I've been using Ubuntu's Breezy Badger for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say, I'm very impressed by it, compared with both Fedora Core 4, and the previous instalment of Ubuntu, Hoary Hedgehog.

Firstly, it does actually serve all my needs (gaming exempted - though I have done any on Windows for at least a month and a half anyway). It has Open Office 2.0, which works very nicely.

It features the Apache web server, and MySQL - which beats IIS on Windows XP any day. The only trouble I have with this is that I haven't managed to set it up yet - though that's partly because I haven't tried too hard, and partly because I haven't read the documents around it. I'm 90% I know what I need to do, and it's not hard.

Secondly, I've managed to set up Skype nicely - something which didn't get on very well with Ubuntu 5.04 when I tried it. Even better, my USB headset is recognised, and playback is very nice. Hopefully, the microphone, when I try it on someone, will work nicely too, and it'll all be good :)

I managed also to mount the rest of my partitions on to Ubuntu, meaning I now can keep all my files separately from my Ubuntu install - which, given the amount I muck around with it, can only be a good thing. It also means I can access the same documents from Windows (not that I have much reason to).

I've also been playing around with a few Bash scripts, for which I can't think of a Windows equivalent. Windows has batch scripts, but they aren't capable of nearly as much (though you can write some useful scripts). I managed to alter a nice Bash script in order to create a panel launcher which, when clicked, selects a random picture from a directory of short-cuts to pictures in my /home folder. Very useful. However, I want to take it a bit further and configure it so that the background changes every x minutes, like you can configure for Webshots on Windows. For that, I need to do a little bit of reading about Cron, which controls all of this.

Also, I've been thinking about using my PC as an alarm clock - my mobile phone isn't very good at waking me up, and I'd much rather be woken up by a file shouting 'You muppet!' (in-joke, you won't get it), or the BBC's old F1 theme tune on full blast (not sure how much the neighbours will like it, but never mind!), and with my PC already switched on, it has more chance of keeping me awake as I can immediately do email, put music on, etc... before I fall straight back to sleep. I wanted to schedule it using Mozilla's Calendar project, but it doesn't provide the functionality (though I'm sure if I suggested it, to extend the application would be easy - as it's something that is in Thunderbird, and it's use would be very similar - just the prompt would be different), but then I realised if I looked at Cron, and could configure it for my desktop wallpaper, it might be just as easy to configure it to act as an alarm clock. We shall see.

Finally, as I keep saying, Ubuntu is the easiest OS I have ever used to install packages and applications. It's quicker than Windows, far easier than .rpm based distributions too. Debian is great :)

So, I'm happy! I've still got loads of CDs if anyone wants them....

Ubuntu Linux

Following on from my successful attempts trying out Ubuntu Linux, I ordered some Ubuntu Linux CDs. They arrived yesterday, so I tried them out on a laptop and on my desktop PC. What surprised me was the ease with which it worked on a laptop I tried the Live CD on. The Live CD recognised the ethernet internet connection instantly, and so I logged in to GAIM* to send mrBen a message to express my pleasure at this, I then installed it on my own system.

It seems to work quite nicely. It takes longer to boot up than Windows XP, and it doesn't have OpenOffice 2.0 on, but it is quite nice nevertheless. It seems much more polished around the edges than many other variants of Linux that I have tried before. The only thing that really frustrates me is that the music ripper was ripping at 2.0x speed, which is rather slow!

Overall, I give it the thumbs up. I've got 6 spare CD's now...anyone want one?

*If you are reading this in the archives, GAIM was renamed Pidgin in 2007, following a legal dispute. They are the same application.

Linux Fun

I have a second hard drive in my desktop that sits idle in my machine, not doing very much at all. Earlier this week, I decided to make use out of it by installing a copy of Ubuntu Linux on it with the help of mrBen. I am actually quite impressed; it has a nice, minimalist interface and seems to have some good programs. Once I get used to the way it works, I think I may find that I like it.

The only problem that I have found so far is that I don't appear to have any programs installed for ripping CD's, so I need to find something that can do that. Another minor problem is that I found that Windows XP no longer appears to recognise the existence of the hard drive I have installed Linux on and Linux doesn't appear to recognise my Windows hard drive, which is a bit of a pain.

Not wanting to stop with Ubuntu, I've also come across a website called Linux From Scratch, which provides a guide to enable you to build your own Linux distro from scratch. I think I've found a nice little project to do! Maybe it might take me a while to realise such grand ambitions...