Reset the No Shampoo Challenge

I recently had my hair cut in Hong Kong, and before I knew what was happening they were washing my hair! Well I knew what was going on, but didn’t want to try and argue.

My hair that hadn’t seen shampoo in almost 26 weeks, that’s half the damn year!

Honestly my hair wasn’t going to well, and I don’t think they would have not washed my hair if I’d asked, but I put that down to the length of it.

It was going down past my nose, completely covering my ears, and was getting down the neck of my shirt. It had these annoying and ridiculous curls. I’ve never had hair that long, I’m so glad they are gone.

Now that my hair is much shorter, I’m back off the shampoo. I have however picked up some experience along the way. Brushing, brushing, brushing. Regular brushing allows the natural oils to get away from the scalp and through you hair. It also helps blood circulation, like massage (which is also a good idea) in your scalp too.

And it’s never getting that long again either.

Dist-Upgrade to Gutsy using Adept

I’ve been using Kubuntu Gutsy for a while and have been keeping up with updates, but now with the final release of Gutsy out I decided to use Adept to dist-upgrade to the final release.

After getting an update of the latest packages, Adept gives you the option to perform the dist-upgrade.

The process is very easy for user to follow, although I did have a message informing me that support from Canonical had run out for some libraries (libgtk1.2).

I was presented with a list of packages that would be installed/updated to complete the upgrade, and I went out to have a coffee (it estimated over an hour for downloading).

The process continued until the Installing the upgrades step, at which point it hung for well over half an hour and I grew impatient and ended it.

Fortunately I was able to use the Full Upgrade option in Adept to install the new updates.

I don’t really have time to install a pre-release version and try again, so I wonder if anyone else has come across this?

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Having issues with mounting NTFS partitons in Gutsy?

Your NTFS partition may not have been shutdown cleanly. Blame Windows.

After upgrading to Gutsy recently, I was annoyed with a particular, persistant problem, where my PC would continually run fsck (disc checking) on every reboot. Every reboot.

And it would hang at the disc checking stage for what seemed like an eternity. Now I’m not a patient person when it comes to PCs so I used Alt + Sys Rq + e (end all processes, nicely) to cancel the task so the init process could continue. There was nothing in the usual logs; dmesg, /var/log/fsck, etc. No reason as to why it would repeatedly get stuck on boot.

This went on for over two weeks until I decided to find out why this was happening. After starting Kubuntu in recovery mode, I watched the boot process up until the disc check; no problems. Then it tried to mount the local filesystem, which is when I saw the message.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdc1′: Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:
Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.
Choice 2: If you don’t have Windows then you can use the ‘force’ option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 -o force
Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0

Still being impatient, I tried searching for what to do, thinking about reporting a bug, going for broke and using the force option, until I realised it was right there in front of me.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)

All I had to do was reboot into Windows and then restart the PC.

Cleanly.

So not using Alt+Ctrl+Del or the restart button, which was no mean feat as my Windows install is plagued and dying a slow painful death. Fortunately the PC did restart and mounting the NTFS partition is now right as rain.

(Again I’m wondering why I even keep it around at all?)

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Kubuntu Experiences – Konqueror

Kubuntu and Gutsy has been quite interesting to use thus far, although I don’t ever really seem to find time to use my computer for more than reading some RSS feeds, and maybe watch a DVD episode (very occasionally).

My experience of Kubuntu Gutsy (from alpha to RC) is pretty standard fare; doing ordinary day to day stuff. I’ve gotta say that KDE has some great things going for it. I really like the tight integration of the default applications.

My application of the moment is Konqueror. Konqueror seems to be the web-cum-file browser that can do just about anything. Konqueror often gets a lot of stick from people, at least in my mind. But in the short time I’ve been using KDE for real, I’ve been very impressed by what Konqueror can do, and I’m probably not even be scratching the surface.

There have been some disappointments using Konqueror on several websites, notably this one; WordPress, where the MCE editor is next to useless (no visual editor) and viewing the main page ends up with two vertical scrollbars.

Other sites won’t even let me do anything, such as Google Docs, which complains about an unsupported browser.

It’s strange, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said or shown, but I’ve always thought that Konqueror was not a standards compliant browser, this without ever having used it. I somehow dreamed up this prejudice believing it was a general opinion, and these experiences I’ve had with WordPress/Google seemed to ‘prove’ it.

It turns out that I am completely wrong. There’s a good website that has an interesting read on this compliance myth among other KDE ones. (I was guilty of several, such as the licenscing of Qt)

If you want to see Konqueror’s standards compliance, you can try the Acid2 test in your browser to confirm this. Just look how bad IE6 is!

On a positive note (and perhaps related to standards compliance) I haven’t had any issues using several banking sites with Konqueror; including ING Direct and Teachers Credit Union.

There is one feature, which I’m totally hooked on at the moment; split views. I simply can’t get enough of these. Here a just a couple of ways you could use the split views.

• Using Konqueror as a picture viewer.



• Viewing PDF files in the integrated viewer, and browsing the filesystem at the same time.



• Using Konqueror to manage a server via FTP, while monitoring the changes in a split view. You can also use the integrated terminal emulator to make changes to say configuration files, etc. Really useful!

You can get the integrated terminal by pressing the key. I did notice some strange behaviour when using the terminal. I found if I navigate using Konqueror (‘Up’, ‘Back’, etc) the file I was working on in the terminal was being edited (deleting lines, etc). Something to look out for.

I’ve also read that Konqueror can browse using other secure protocols, such as SSH and SFTP. It can even let you view nicely formatted man and info pages.

I haven’t even begun to look at Konqueror’s ability to use virtual filesystems, integrate with Amarok nor the actions you can configure to happen for certain filetypes. Just go to Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> File Associations!

Have fun!

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‘The Perfect Server’ as Intranet Server on a Windows AD Domain

Long winded title, but you may find the outcome very useful.

With more time at work to spend on things other than .NET coding, I decided it would be great to setup one of my PCs as a company intranet server. In fact I was directed to do something like this a while ago, but didn’t get the time.

My department does a lot of project work, and thus needs a central location for relevant files. We already have one on our Windows 2003 server, which I is an extremely tempremental beast, but we could benefit from having some sort of content system around these files. That would allow managers and directors to log into our network from anywhere in the world and get the information they want. Browsing through dozens of folders isn’t easy or flashy (flashy is good).

So I set about setting up my old Xubuntu box as a local server (it won’t be facing the outside world). It’s got a AMD3200 CPU and 512MB RAM, which should be quite sufficient.

The first important step is to get a server actually setup. The process I followed, sometimes blindly, was contained in the great Perfect Setup – Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 Server [Howto Forge]. Following the steps you can’t go wrong.

If I could make several points about the installation they would be;

The guide does mention this but I want to reiterate it. After installing the OpenSSH server and configuring the network (Steps 4 and 5), log into the server machine from another PC. I didn’t realise just how useful this would be until I was constantly changing between computers on my KVM switch.

Coupled with the fact that most application windows handle mouse scrolling without taking the focus, you can have the HowTo running in a web browser, while entering in the commands into a terminal window connected to the server via SSH. It’s as simple as

ssh <servername> -l <username>

OR

ssh <username>@<servername>

Setting up the server so that it would be seen on the Windows Active Directoy Domain as server1.companyname.com and not it’s IP address was a little harder. Well actually it was very easy to do, but it took a long time to find out what needed to be done. At this point in time I was not interested in SAMBA or authenticating the server on the domain, all I wanted was for people to be able to access the server by it’s hostname not it’s IP.

The solution was actually very simple. In the Windows 2003 server in it’s Computer Management section is an area for DNS. You need to add a new host to the domain; then simply enter in the computer’s hostname and IP address.

Simple!

Next I’m planning to setup SAMBA so I can share files/folders on the domain and install a content management system on the server.

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