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.

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?

Social Bookmarks:

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?)

Social Bookmarks:

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!

Social Bookmarks:

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.

Social Bookmarks:

Recently someone ‘upgraded’ a fairly well known piece of office software (no not that one) and in the process broke another program that was working in between said program and a custom DB system I had made.

Needless to say I was right pissed, only being told after the event; with no time to assess the upgrade, check that the new version would be compatible or to make sure it was done correctly.

The upgrade being done incorrectly left pieces of an old ODBC driver lying about the Windows registry (shudder), which took a long time to scour and clean up. It took me just as long to find the cause and solution to the problem as it did to fix it, due to poor documentation.

Anyway, finally, even after getting this driver working again, the second program, which runs between the two DB systems was still broken because it was not patched for this upgrade.

Their tech support tells me they are working on a patch, which won’t be ready until the end of the week. In the meantime, I am ferrying data between the two systems manually, and am ever so slightly, going crazy.

The final straw and the case for my argument was that the purpose of this so called ‘patch’ is to fix the part of the program that checks the version of the aforementioned DB program. If I could have modified the code, all I’d need to do is change it so it would allow the latest version. Apparently it would have been as easy as modifying a ’10′ to an ’11′.

Ai! Where’s my wine?

I tried out Kubuntu in my first days of using GNU/Linux, and absolutely hated it. I thought it was too much, too tacky with the cutsy looking icons, boucning cursor and every application began with a K. GNOME was a much s simpler step for me coming from Windows. This seemed to go against popular ‘opinion’ or at least as I percieved it; that KDE is more like Windows (aysiu has some nice dissections on this topic and many others).

Anyway, it’s almost 2 years since I first used Kubuntu; I’m ready for a second go.

I’ve been going great running Edgy at home, I skipped Feisty due to freezing issues, but now feel like I’m left behind in terms of leading edge developments. Simply stated I’m talking Compiz-Fusion. But I’ll get to that another day.

I’ve been very impressed with several KDE applications I’ve picked up along the way; KTorrent, Yakuake and KDiff3 come to mind.

I’ve also just finished an extensive project at work (for now), which required daily usage of .NET. Now I’m done with that I’m really keen to liberate this machine and turn my other box running Xubuntu into a local network server (for our project files, Bugzilla, Plone and other goodies).

So the conditions were just right to try out Gutsy Tribe 5.

The installation was simple and smooth as I’ve come to expect from installing Ubuntu . The issue had installing Feisty with Ubiquity and partitions didn’t re-appear, although it may have been because I was starting from a fresh partition.

My initial impression of Kubuntu this time, that it is very comprehensive. From applications to settings and the ability to customise, I could see there was many things I could play around with.

The first was installing the NVIDIA drivers so I could get Kubuntu across both of my monitors. The restricted drivers manager handles this easily, and setting up the second monitor in the NVIDIA settings dialog was simple.

The result….

And with a little time and effort (and GNU/Linux experience) I quickly changed those things that irked me most; opening files with a single-click, bouncing cursor and the original theme (it just makes me think of candy that is way tooo sweet!). I think this could be the start of something great.

We had a two and a half day romp in the snow last weekend, which was uncharacteristically good for Aussie snow in July.

Thredbo has such a poor year of snow in 2006 (check out the Snow Depth Chart (1 MB PDF); possibly the worst in 40 years!), so I was anxious about our ski trip this year.

Fears were alleviated in the week leading up to last weekend, where the snow was just dumping down. In my history of Australian snow experiences, this was an unusual treat. The snow was fantastic!

We’ve already planned at least one return trip this season, maybe even two.

Some users in the office recently were given Office 2007 on their PCs. Why some and not all I don’t understand, but already I’ve had many complaints about it. I’ve never used or even seen Office 2007 until this, and quite frankly don’t ever want too.

But sadly, I know that I will have to as part of my extra-employment activities.

I’ve already had one or two on how the interface works and a good discussion on how the new file formats will (or most likely won’t) work in the context of the office. In our case they certainly won’t work as people are creating new documents in Office 2007, which other staff simply can’t read. I don’t want to be around when this blows out.

But the most interesting was one this morning. Office 2007 killed the spelling tool in Outlook Express. One of our staff is using Windows XP (and Outlook-Express) and since someone installed Office 2007 on his PC it has completely borked his Outlook Express spell checker.

It tries to correct almost every word, yet offers no sensible alternative, whilst also denying the ability to add the proper word to the dictionary.

For example, this ordinary sentence;

Dear <Name>,
Please find attached the latest price list ... <blah, blah , blah>

The spell check will query the following words;

Please, find, attached, latest, price, list

While this person was fuming over the inability to spell check their emails, without using Word 2007 as an intermediate step, I was quietly laughing (and cringing) in my cup of coffee.

Sorry for the misleading title.  I just couldn’t get anywhere with Feisty, and I’d had enough.
Down-grading was an issue-and-a-half too; a week full of frustration.

I went for my Ubuntu Edgy CD, but after installing was unable to log into a GNOME session, the screen froze before anything had loaded. I tried the same thing with my Xubuntu Edgy CD and was able to log into a XFCE session, but not a GNOME one.

After squeezing my home folder into some backup space, I re-installed this time starting with the /home folder fresh. This time there was no problem getting into GNOME so I assumed there was some configuration issue.

After copying back most of my /home folder, save any .gnome, .gnome2, etc folders, I proceeded to re-install all the programs I need, only to find the same freeze on starting a GNOME session.

Rather than re-installing (I was getting pretty hot around the collar), I worked my way through each configuration file; finally resting on my ALSA sound configuration file; .asoundrc.

I don’t know what’s wrong with it, as it hasn’t changed since I got my sound card working a while back. I do miss surround sound, but for now I’m just happy to have a working, non-freezing PC.