It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.

On looking at the dell site I still had my dell financial services account and a credit line there. We decided that monthly payments would work out better right now, went through the order process and their 30 second credit reauthorization and the order looked good. It was an inspiron 15R I think customized. Not exactly what I wanted (really wanted linux preinstalled – but their options for that at dell are fairly limited – the place I had looked at was a good 400-600 more expensive,etc…)

So, I watched and waited for a week. The day before the laptop was supposed to arrive I had logged in to see if there was any change in the order status and…. It showed up as canceled. ?!?!? It was after hours so I dropped an email to customer support. They “must have called or emailed first”. was essentially what I was told. No voice mail messages, no emails from dell. It escalated through several customer representatives over a few days, but the bottom line was they canceled my order without an attempt to call me.

I have bought 3-4 computers from Dell for myself and others in the last 15 years or so. I can’t remember how many dozens I’ve walked through the process of buying through dells online store. Then there are the 50-100+ that I have suggested just go look at dell when they wanted to talk to me about buying a new computer.

I told them about it.

As I thought… I went to hp and found a better machine for about 200 more and ordered it. (Billmelater – gives a no interest 6 months and then payment like dell financing does.) I’m using that right now. I have officially bid farewall to Dell. I don’t plan to buy from them again.

So, I got a pavilion dv6z se (special edition). It has an aluminum case which I think makes it feel like the most solid and well built laptop I have ever had. (4 core – amd processor – 6GB memory.)

While the laptop ships with windows 7, my first task was to make a backup image of the original drive state (clonezilla). Then I installed ubuntu lucid 10.04 and haven’t looked back. To say that this flies in comparison to the old laptop is an understatement.

I hope the increased productivity that I’m going to find here will help me get back into a routine of posting here and other places so keep an eye out for more upcoming posts. In fact I would like to give coverage to a cloud backup service I’ve started using.

I can’t tell you how slow the old machine was in comparison. I have looked at my cpu usage and typically am keeping two cores busy with my work flow which says to me I was severely overtaxing the old machine.

When the laptop first arrived with the HP preinstalled Windows 7….. This was a 500GB drive and 50GB was already in use. There was the rescue partition weighing in around 20GB and then there was the windows partition with windows 7 at 30GB. I suspect there was also a metric ton of other junky software that I wouldn’t have wanted anyway. HP advisor or HP hoosit or whatever other “utilities” are sent along from hp these days. Trial antivirus from whoever, and other programs that I would have probably never used.

After my ubuntu install do you want to guess how much disk space was used?

Go ahead try….

5GB (and that was with some of my data already copied over and most of my preferred extra software installed over the base install.)

So in many ways it’s just as well they don’t do ubuntu preinstalled on these – they’d probably hulk it up with a lot of useless junk….

On the plus side – HP has been very communicative along the way with email updates when the laptop shipped. (Shipped from Shanghai on a Friday and was on my doorstep Monday at 10:55….. with free shipping…. ) I’ve had a followup survey through which I expressed an interest in ubuntu preinstalled models.

So, how does ubuntu 10.4 work on the hp pavilion dv6z se? Very well. Let’s see… I installed and have wireless working, 3d working pretty much out of the box…. There was the hardware advisor to get the wireless and 3d working.

My biggest annoyance was the special function keys (volume, media player controls) took precendence over the f1-f12 keys. A change in bios solved that. It’s not a linux issue – it’s a design decision on this laptop – they decided wouldn’t mind pressing fn+ the key to get a f12.

Right now the only thing that I can think of that isn’t working is the fingerprint reader. It looks like it’s a slightly newer model hardware than those that are currently supported. I suspect in a short time it will be supported. (By the time I upgrade to the next Long Term Support release it probably will.) Although…. I don’t really care that it works or not.

Camera and audio all work well too. No tinkering required.

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

In ubuntu/debian linux software installs, there are such things as “metapackages” which is a package that just describes what OTHER packages it “needs”. For instance in ubuntu, the kubuntu-desktop package is just such a package – when choosing it, it installs everything necessary for the kubuntu desktop/customizations to install. So, I was hit with an idea while I was apt-getting 30-40 odd packages…. everytime I “provision” a new ubuntu system I have a list of packages that I want to make sure are installed, why don’t I just create a single metapackage and be done with it to make life simpler…. But how could I do this?

This article has the essentials…. make an empty directory structure….

mkdir -p package/DEBIAN

and create a control file….. *(single text file, named control in the DEBIAN folder)

example from above site…

Package: iandefors-metapackage
Essential: no
Priority: extra
Section: metapackages
Maintainer: Ian Defor
Architecture: i386
Version: 1
Depends: abiword, gnumeric, xchat-gnome
Description: Iandefor’s Metapackage
Iandefor’s preferred packages

Customized of course to your preference….

And then dpkg-deb -b package name.deb

It might be worthwhile to break your metapackages up into a couple of “thought” groups… internet / multimedia /etc… but if you’ve got several systems and want to make sure you quickly and easily install the same software on each this could be a good shortcut for you.

For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.

One of my LONG standing frustrations with Windows is the lack of useful command line tools (including the ability to email from the command interface which, to me, is CRUCIAL when scripting.) But on studying the smartmontools documentation I found reference to blat blat is a simple command line emailer for windows. You install it to the path (Windows\system32 is a good choice), then from the cli can install it to use a default mail server and sending address and then you’re in business. All that’s needed then for your windows boxes to email smartmontools distress calls is to edit the smartd configuration file to do routine tests, add the -m option and address to mail to (you can also have a message box popup too).. Then install and start the smartd service and you’ll hopefully have a bit earlier warning on those hard drive failures.

Sometimes drives fail quickly, but if you can have a 12 hour heads up that might be the difference between a quick and easy drive cloning and a long and tedious rebuild.

A few days ago I was researching possibilities for linux boot without rebooting to a cd. I found something interesting in instlux. Essentially, it’s a windows installer style download that can bootstrap and install a linux distribution (looks like Linkat, OpenSuse and Ubuntu are currently supported.) I’m curious to actually try this out in the near future as it looks inteesting (you can choose either cd or network based installs).

Of course, what started it was looking at ways to install linux without having the option to boot from cd..

One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu does not have apache in the enabled repositories. (Apache2)… following the intsructions given I first added opengroupware’s (debian sarge) repository

to /etc/apt/sources.list ( deb http://download.opengroupware.org/nightly/packages/debian sarge trunk )… then installed apache2 instead of apache *(as apache is not in the default package repositories) and then postgresql-8.1, and libapache-mod-ngobjweb, then opengroupware.org opengroupware.org1.1-webui-theme* and
opengroupware.org-environment… /etc/init.d/opengroupware seemed to restart with no problems, but the install was not accessible via the http://localhost/OpenGroupware address.

So, being in a VM, I restarted from scratch quickly and enabled the universe and multiverse repositories and installed apache and so on down the list and things worked. I did see that apache2 has two modules disabled by default that opengroupware relies upon, a quick test of that in the first setup didn’t seem to resolve the problems and I didn’t have time to troubleshoot the how’s and why’s.

So… the bottom line – use apache instead of apache2 for a quick and easy way to get opengroupware.org up and running on ubuntu server.

I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….

After all is setup and installed with the base operating system they recommend logging in and doing sudo su (to avoid having to sudo everything else…)

Then they suggest installing openssh-server (which in most of my setups has been a near necessity…)

Here are the other required packages…

libx11-6 libx11-dev libxtst6 xlibs-dev xinetd wget linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential gcc binutils-doc cpp-doc make manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gdb gcc-doc gcc-4.0-doc libc6-dev-amd64 lib64gcc1

After that they suggest creating /var/vm for your virtual machines – where you put them is really up to you….

and then download and run through the installers from vmware. That section is really fairly easy if you’ve already got the above packages setup. (build-essential and linux-headers-`uname -r` are especially nice to have installed (even in an ubuntu virtual machine guest for the purposes of building the vmware guest tools.))

There is a problem with the httpd.vmware startup script – the directory it looks for is missing on reboot, so you will want to edit /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware and add the following after start)

mkdir -p /var/run/vmware/httpd
chown www-data:www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd

as referenced in this pdf

In the US and Europe and many more developed parts of the world we take our internet connectivity these days for granted. (And some go into panic attacks when it’s not available…) In some parts of the world though internet connections are not as wide/broad and peak usage times can make for very slow viewing, or can interfere with other vital communications. Linux excels at SO many things and this is something we could use linux to help with…

In some of my web browsing, I came across this script… http://www.ituprising.com/malawi/blog/jon/offline_web_browsing which takes advantage of cron or atd scheduling and wget. It can give you a few options for compression, but ultimately can download a website for offline browsing.

This could also be handy if you’re going to be without connectivity for a while. (Although many database driven sites like wikis (i.e. wikipedia) would prefer you just download a static version of the database instead and may block your ip if you do heavy wget’ing…….)

By the way, the blog referenced is written by a fellow based in Malawi and covers quite a few interesting topics. Many of the tech topics are Ubuntu/Debian related.

Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s a tremendously good idea to test what a website looks like in multiple browsers because they all have their own unique …. quirks. Of course, there are other reasons…. sites that refuse to work with anything but IE. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield for instance has some web apps that will not work with anything else.)

Well… now Internet Explorer 7 is supported by ies4linux….

This news is about 2 weeks old, but I wanted to make sure I had it on my site so I can find it when I’m ready to add IE7 to the installed IE’s on my desktop. Here’s the ies4linux site. It should be noted that you are supposed to have a valid windows license before installing IE on your linux system. One of the REAL beauties of running linux is you have the choice of keeping MULTIPLE versions of MULTIPLE browsers installed side by side without virtualization.

Oh… you’ll need ies4linux 2.5 beta to have a choice to install IE7 and they still recommend that you not use IE for browsing but instead use firefox….

I thought I had written about this once before, but when I searched the site to find the solution I had come across before, I couldn’t find my post…. so, sorry if this is a duplication, but I’ve run into this on some AMD 64-bit based system boards. The most recent was based on the nvidia nforce4 chipset. Essentially in booting from either the alternative install cd or livecd for Ubuntu/kubuntu/edubuntu/xubuntu…. there is a freeze in the boot process. It goes for 30 seconds or more looking as though it’s hard frozen, but it does eventually manage to load the installer.

Within the installer though there seem to be issues finding hardware. (unable to find cdrom drive, asking to load driver from a disk…. among other things.)

Ultimately, I’ve found a few kernel options and a BIOS setting change that made a BIG difference and had the system booting up the cd VERY quickly and successfully finding hardware.

The long and short of it is to add the following kernel options….

acpi=off irqpoll

After this things MOSTLY worked, but I was still getting errors about devices not having irq’s assigned, so… I entered the BIOS and set Plug and Play OS to NO and then all seemed to be recognized with no complaints. I’m not sure if this is just ubuntu related, a specific kernel version, or support for the hardware, but I was glad to finally find a workable setup.

I should note, that the success happened with the 32-bit version of Ubuntu on this hardware. I recall testing the 64-bit version and having the same freeze on bootup though.

(The especially long freeze was at “mounting root file system”.) I haven’t tested with the 6.10 Edgy installer cd (in part because I wanted LTS on the system in question.)

BTW – another symptom of this problem was that when X came up the mouse was not used. The device had been detected correctly in /dev and was setup right in X, but the pointer wouldn’t budge at the login screen. After the above fixes, everything went well.