Reilly2040's Blog

So, I decided to take the plunge, and partition off a small (couple of Gb) Linux system on my laptop, to see if it would be usable enough to replace Windows on it.

So, I put on Ubuntu 8.04, and in fairness to it (you can tell this is going to end well ), most stuff worked perfectly. Graphics and sound worked no problem, although by default the switch to enable headphone jack sensing was switched to off. However once I found the option in the mixer, it worked perfectly. Graphics (intel-based) ran fine at 1024×768, with even Compiz working fine (although I switched it off as its not really needed on my laptop).

However, there was a big problem. Wifi.

Now, Ethernet worked fine. I plugged in a cable, set the IP address etc, and the laptop was online no problem. However my wifi light remained dark. A quick bit of reading up, and I found out my wireless card (Broadcom 4306) needed to use either ndiswrapper or the new B43-fwcutter to use the Windows driver/access the firmware code. Fair enough. I tried both, and in both cases the blue light came on. However also in both cases, I couldn’t connect to my WPA-secured network.

After spending an afternoon messing about with it. I admitted defeat.

In the evening though, I thought, as a last-ditch attempt, I’ll try Mandriva just to see if another distro can sort it out.  I installed the system, and was very happy to see that one of the last steps in the installation was to select the driver (I picked B43-fwcutter) and enter all your wireless settings.  Something I must admit I prefer to Ubuntu’s (sort it out after you’ve rebooted approach, although there’s no real benefit to either).

Much to my surprise, the wifi sprung to life.  The blue light came on, and it connected.   I was pretty happy.

However, I do prefer Ubuntu’s package management.  So I thought that perhaps KDE made the difference.  So I tried installing Kubuntu.  Long story short, I must admit, I found Kubuntu much less polished than the main distro, but I also was back to having a non-working wifi.

Currently I’ve reinstalled Mandriva.  However, big surprise, the wifi’s playing up again.   I’m pretty much at the point of sticking to Windows, and just trying to ensure that my next laptop (which is probably a while away) has a natively-supported wifi chipset.

I am wondering however if part of the problem is me trying out different drivers (ndiswrapper and b43-fwcutter) and if they’re causing problems for each other.   Of course, installing one uninstalls the other, and I update the blacklist as appropriate, but given that I did get it working under Mandriva at one point, I am stuck wondering what exactly is going on.

That was typical.   No sooner had I finished that last post, and my Ubuntu updates dialog popped up again.   I let it grab the latest Gnome updates, and then it went about configuring everything.  Including the kernel updates that hadn’t been properly configured last time.

Turns out the issue was that when they’d first installed, I tried to select some of the other options regarding the menu.lst file (display diffs etc).  That seemed to confuse issues.  This time, knowing my current menu.lst file was backed up, I simply let it write the default package one to the boot folder.   Once it was finished setting everything up, I went in and put back in the entries I needed (mainly Windows at the top of the list).  One reboot later, and everything’s working fine on the new kernel.

The new options to try and deal more sensibly with the menu.lst clashes are certainly welcome, but I guess there’s still a few bugs to be worked out there.

So, as I’d mentioned previously, following my system rebuild, my LAMP server wasn’t quite playing ball.

I finally had time to look into it the other week, and it came down to the MySQL administration.

Previously, I’d been using the MySQL-admin GUI to setup my local databases and users, but for some reason, when setting them up under my current installation, the GUI wasn’t assigning the login credentials properly.  This meant that whenever I tried to install phpBB or Joomla or something locally, the database connection kept complaining.

So, I installed the trusted phpMyAdmin and tried setting the users up with that.   It was slightly less user-friendly I thought, but ultimately, it also worked.  Login credentials were correctly assigned, and the php applications were much happier connecting to the database.

Weird one though.  The MySQL-admin package shouldn’t be any different from the one I was using previously, which worked fine.   But nonetheless I’ve got the system working now, which is the main thing for me.

Now I just need to figure out what went wrong with the latest kernel update from Ubuntu.   I installed all the latest updates the other day, and when I try and boot off the new kernel image, the NVidia driver throws a wobbly.  Fortunately I can boot off the previous image and get a perfectly usable system until I get it fixed though.

Ok, its half 1 in the morning, and I’m knackered.

I’ve now got my Windows system pretty much usable again. I had to spend all afternoon going through my iTunes library, removing dud duplicates it created when reimporting my (sadly several months old and missing stuff) backup though. And I’m still bitter about it nuking music on my iPod that it should’ve just transferred back to the PC like it was supposed to.

I’ve been in general quite happy with how smooth Ubuntu was to get back to a usable state. Granted, extra Window Managers and the like still need to be reinstalled, but that’s going to be trivial with Synaptic.

The only problem I’m having is with the LAMP server. I used the same tutorial as before, however now, whenever I create a new MySQL user, despite setting a password, they only connect to the database when the password field is blank. Plus the PHP installation doesn’t seem to like talking to MySQL at all. Its a bit of a contrast to the first time I set it up, where it went really smoothly.

However, that stuff is low priority thankfully. This isn’t a work PC, so that can always be fixed during the week.

Doctor Who was good though. Must post on that tomorrow.

Ok, so reinstalling my whole PC hasn’t been an awful lot of fun. And thanks to iTunes for kicking me while I’m down, by deleting the music that was on my iPod that it could’ve just synced back into the library. That’s my freshly-bought Iron Man soundtrack up the spout. Think I’ll just buy the CD next time Steve.

However, doing a clean install of Windows and Ubuntu has been an interesting experience. It has to be said, that out of the two Ubuntu wins hands down. It was faster for a start. But more importantly it was also a heck of a lot smarter at detecting my hardware. On booting into my freshly installed Windows system I had no network card and no sound. Fortunately I had the Asus driver CD, so I was able to get them up and running, but the missing network connection was a heart-stop moment.

Contrast this with Ubuntu, which auto-detected all my hardware smoothly. Getting it online was a breeze. And as a plus, Hardy also now correctly uses my router as a DNS server. Previous Linux installations have always needed the direct IP addresses for the DNS servers supplied by my ISP. The only real glitch was in the NVidia driver, which wasn’t properly setup. But that was quickly fixed by installing the newer package from synaptic, and then running the command prompted by the Nvidia config utility.

However, the really fun thing was a result of XP service pack 3. Of course, with a newly-minted Windows install I got my anti-virus and firewall reinstalled and then hit Windows Update. The first thing it got me to install was SP3. I’d heard dodgy things, so wasn’t too happy, but what can you do?

However, a real fun factor of SP3, is that it breaks the ability to install MS software, and use Windows update. Installing separate things like iTunes was a breeze, but Windows Live Messenger, or all those critical IE fixes just wouldn’t install.

A quick websearch through up this forum post.

Essentially you can fix it by copy-and-pasting the following into a command prompt:

regsvr32 wups2.dll

Its easily fixed. But still, that’s a hell of a bug to leave in there. Crippling Windows Update also makes me wonder how exactly they’re planning on rolling out the fix…

I was listening to The Linux Action Show today, and they were talking about this new development work that’s being done on Ubuntu’s login screen.

I must admit, if the screenshot is a good example of the look they’re going for, then I really like it. I’m a sucker for eye candy, but also I had been thinking the other day about what would be involved in terms of my wife using Ubuntu. Currently she’s happy using my laptop, and one of the things is that she knows she just has to click on the picture of herself at the login screen to get into her desktop settings. Currently with the default Ubuntu login screen, she’d have to remember her login name, and her password.

Ok, so its a complete eye-candy thing, that a lot of Ubuntu users may not find useful, but its probably going to be another of those pieces of work that makes Ubuntu appealing to general desktop users.

I hope development goes well on it, and we see it as an option in an upcoming release soon.

The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment « Content Consumer

Here’s an interesting experiment someone’s done. He set up a clean install of the latest Ubuntu, and gave his girlfriend a series of tasks, to try and see just how newbie friendly Ubuntu is these days.

It doesn’t do too badly, although some things do trip her up (and reasonably so – package installation is a big change for people used to using Windows for everything).

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but one thing I really wanted to sort out on my Ubuntu desktop, was setting it up as a LAMP server.

LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. Essentially I wanted to get these setup so I could install web applications locally for messing about with, and for working on my own web development skills.

I had previously installed them all from the Ubuntu repositories, but I was having problems with the rights for my various applications, so wanted to have another shot at it.

Of course, like with most things in Ubuntu, the key is in the community resources. There’s a great tutorial for setting this up here. After a short bit of messing about, following the instructions, I was up and running. I got a public_html directory defined for my local user, and then installed a backup copy of this blog to run completely locally. The big advantage being that if there are new mods, or a significant upgrade, or if something’s just giving me grief on the live blog, I’ve now got a safe test environment to work in.

Following a brief look at a friend’s phpBB 3 forum, I’ve also decided to install it on my Ubuntu box as well. I’m really enjoying the idea of being able to play with these things, without them being public on the internet. Plus it gives me a platform to start looking at proper PHP coding, so hopefully I can start trying to customise my blog a bit more.

With Ubuntu 8.04 now including a Wubi installer on the CD, I thought this provided a great chance to try Ubuntu on my laptop. Wubi allows you to install Ubuntu as if it was a Windows application. It installs via Windows, but on rebooting, you get the choice of Windows or Ubuntu to boot into. If you decide you want rid of it, then boot into Windows, and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows app. The real benefit of this is that it doesn’t touch your Windows system, so for trying out Ubuntu it gives you the complete experience with none of the risk.

It works very well I must say. It installed easily, and on booting it sorted out the Linux system in the virtual disc it had created. Eventually I was faced with the usual Ubuntu login prompt and then desktop.

Unfortunately there was one thing that gave me a problem. I couldn’t get my wireless to work at all. My laptop (HP NX6110) has a Broadcom card that is apparently supported, but I had varying degrees of success via ndiswrapper and the bcm43xx drivers. Ndiswrapper at least managed to get my laptop’s wifi light to come on, but I couldn’t then get connected to my wireless network. I should say however that my ethernet worked no problem.

So, despite messing around with it for a good while, I just couldn’t get the wifi to work. I ended up removing the ubuntu installation, but I wouldn’t let this stop anyone else from trying out Wubi. Wifi is still tied up in proprietary Windows drivers for the most part, and for anyone else curious about trying Ubuntu out, I’d really recommend trying out the Wubi installation method. Everything else worked fine on my laptop on boot up (display, sound, ethernet) and its a great tool for anyone curious about Linux, but unsure about getting rid of their Windows installation.

Another of probably a few linux posts today

So I found my first issue.  As its a new installation of Firefox (3.0 Beta 5), there’s no flash support.  No problem, since Firefox prompts you to install the Flash player, and even gives a few options of different ones to try.

Being a freedom-hater (and wanting to go with the known quantity) I installed the non-free Adobe plugin.

Which worked except there was no sound while Youtube videos were playing.

A quick search of Ubuntu Forums threw up this thread.  Essentially (for anyone else with this problem), all you have to do is fire up Synaptec and install libflashsupport.

Nice easy fix