The Linux Experiment

Since I’ve installed Gentoo, I haven’t had access to my other drives. One of them is an NTFS-formatted WD Raptor, and the other is a generic Seagate 300GB drive that contains my documents, pictures and Communist propaganda inside a TrueCrypt partition. Getting the Raptor to work was fairly simple (as far as Gentoo goes) – I added the entry to my /etc/fstab file and then manually mounted the partition:

/dev/sdb1               /mnt/raptor     ntfs-3g         noatime         0 0

The TrueCrypt drive proved to be more of an issue. After installing the software and attempting to mount the partition, I encountered an error:

device-mapper: reload ioctl failed: Invalid argument 
Command failed

A quick Bing and the Gentoo Wiki described this problem exactly, with the caveat that I had to recompile my kernel to add support for LRW and XTS support. Into the kernel configuration I went – the only difference I noticed is that LRW and XTS are considered “EXPERIMENTAL” but aren’t noted as such on the requirements page:

(This may come down to an x64 vs. x86 issue, but I haven’t run into any issues with these options enabled (yet!))

Of course, then came the make && make modules_install commands, which didn’t take too long to complete. The question then became, how do I install the new kernel? Looking in my /boot partition, I only had a few template files – and not the kernel itself or any grub settings. Essentially, /boot had nothing in it but the system still launches properly!

I then tried mounting /dev/sda1 manually, and the kernel and grub.conf showed up properly in the mountpoint. Something is obviously wrong with the way my system remounts /boot during the startup process, but at least now I’m able to install the new kernel. After copying /arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage to the newly available directory, I rebooted and the new kernel was picked up properly. TrueCrypt now lets me open, create and delete files from /media/truecrypt1, and automatically uses ntfs-3g support to accomplish this.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased at how easily I can recompile a kernel, and installation was seamless once I figured out that /boot wasn’t pointing to the right location. I expect I’ll try and manually remove the directory from /dev/sda3 and see if that makes a difference.

After my first two attempts at getting my Blackberry to sync with Mozilla Thunderbird, I got pissed off and went right to the source of my problems. I emailed the developer of the opensync-plugin-mozilla package that (allegedly) allows Thunderbird to play nicely with OpenSync, and gave him the what for, (politely) asking what I should do. He suggested that I follow the updated installation instructions for checking out and compiling the latest version of his plugin from scratch instead of using the older, precompiled versions that are no longer supported.

I set to it, first removing all of the packages that I had installed during my last two attempts, excluding Barry, as I had already built and installed the latest version of its libraries. Everything else, including OpenSync and all of its plugins went, and I started from scratch. Luckily, the instructions were easy to follow, although they recommended that I get the latest versions of some libraries by adding Debian’s sid repositories to my sources list. This resulted in me shitting my pants later in the day, when I saw 642 available updates for my system in Synaptic. I figured out what was going on pretty quickly and disabled updates from sid, without ruining my system. If there’s one thing that Windows has taught me over the years, it is to never set a machine to auto-install updates.

Once I had the source code and dependency libraries, the install was a snap. The plugin source came with a utils directory full of easy to use scripts that automated most of the process. With everything going swimmingly, I was jarred out of my good mood by a nasty error that occurred when I ran the build-install-opensync.sh script:

CMake Error at cmake/modules/FindPkgConfig.cmake:357 (message):
None of the required ‘libopensync1;>=0.39′ found
Call Stack (most recent call first):
cmake/modules/FindOpenSync.cmake:27 (PKG_SEARCH_MODULE)
CMakeLists.txt:15 (FIND_PACKAGE)

CMake Error at cmake/modules/FindOpenSync.cmake:46 (MESSAGE):
OpenSync cmake modules not found.  Have you installed opensync core or did
you set your PKG_CONFIG_PATH if installing in a non system directory ?
Call Stack (most recent call first):
CMakeLists.txt:15 (FIND_PACKAGE)

It turns out that the plugin requires OpenSync v0.39 or greater to be installed to work. Of course, the latest version of same in either the Debian main or lenny-backports repositories is v0.22-2. This well-aged philosophy of the Debian Stable build has irked me a couple of times now, and I fully intend to update my system to the testing repositories before the end of the month. In any case, I quickly made my way over to the OpenSync homepage to obtain a newer build of their libraries. There I found out not only that version 0.39 had just been released on September 21st, and also that it isn’t all that stable:

Releases 0.22 (and 0.2x svn branch) and before are considered stable and suitable for production. 0.3x releases introduce major architecture and API changes and are targeted for developers and testers only and may not even compile or are likely to contain severe bugs.

0.3x releases are not recommended for end users or distribution packaging.

Throwing caution to the wind, I grabbed a tarball of compilation scripts from the website, and went about my merry way gentooing it up. After a couple of minor tweaks to the setEnvOpensync.sh script, I got the cmpOpensync script to run, which checked out the latest trunk from the svn, and automatically compiled and installed it for me. By running the command msynctool –version, I found out that I now had OpenSync v0.40-snapshot installed. Relieved, I headed back to my BlueZync installation. This time around, I managed to get right up to the build-install-bluezync.sh script before encountering another horrible dependency error:

– checking for one of the modules ‘glib-2.0′
–   found glib-2.0, version 2.16.6
– Found GLib2: glib-2.0 /usr/include/glib-2.0;/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include
– Looking for include files HAVE_GLIB_GREGEX_H
– Looking for include files HAVE_GLIB_GREGEX_H – found
– checking for one of the modules ‘libxml-2.0′
–   found libxml-2.0, version 2.6.32
– checking for one of the modules ‘libopensync1′
–   found libopensync1, version 0.40-snapshot
– checking for one of the modules ‘thunderbird-xpcom;icedove-xpcom’
–   found icedove-xpcom, version 2.0.0.22
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_VERSION 2.0.0.22
–     THUNDERBIRD_VERSION_MAIN 2
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_MAIN_INCLUDE_DIR /usr/include/icedove
–     NSPR_MAIN_INCLUDE_DIR /usr/include/nspr
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_LIBRARY_DIRS /usr/lib/icedove
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_LIBRARIES xpcom;plds4;plc4;nspr4;pthread;dl
– checking for one of the modules ‘sunbird-xpcom;iceowl-xpcom’
–   found iceowl-xpcom, version 0.8
SUNBIRD_INCLUDE_DIRS /usr/include/iceowl;/usr/include/iceowl/xpcom;/usr/include/iceowl/string;/usr/include/nspr
SEVERAL
–      SUNBIRD_MAIN_INCLUDE_DIR /usr/include/iceowl
–      SUNBIRD_VERSION 0.8
– Found xpcom (thunderbird and sunbird):
–   THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_VERSION=[2.0.0.22]
–   SUNBIRD_VERSION=[0.8]
–   THUNDERBIRD_VERSION_MAIN=[2]
–   SUNBIRD_VERSION_MAIN=[0]
–   XPCOM_INCLUDE_DIRS /usr/include/nspr;/usr/include/icedove;/usr/include/icedove/addrbook;/usr/include/icedove/extensions;/usr/include/icedove/rdf;/usr/include/icedove/string;/usr/include/icedove/xpcom_obsolete;/usr/include/icedove/xpcom;/usr/include/icedove/xulapp;/usr/include/iceowl
–   XPCOM_LIBRARY_DIRS /usr/lib/icedove
–   XPCOM_LIBRARIES xpcom;plds4;plc4;nspr4;pthread;dl
–   SUNBIRD_VERSION 0.8
CALENDAR_VERSION=[8]
LIBTBXPCOM_INCLUDE_DIR
XPCOM_LIBRARIES  xpcom;plds4;plc4;nspr4;pthread;dl
ENABLE_TESTING [yes]
TESTING ENABLED
– checking for one of the modules ‘check’
CMake Error at cmake/modules/FindPkgConfig.cmake:357 (message):
None of the required ‘check’ found
Call Stack (most recent call first):
cmake/modules/FindCheck.cmake:27 (PKG_SEARCH_MODULE)
CMakeLists.txt:73 (FIND_PACKAGE)

CMAKING mozilla-sync 0.1.7
– Configuring done

From what I can gather from this output, the configuration file was checking for dependencies, and got hung up on one called “check.” Unfortunately, this gave me zero information that I could use to solve the problem. I can verify that the install failed by running msynctool –listplugins, which returns:

Available plugins:
msynctool: symbol lookup error: msynctool: undefined symbol: osync_plugin_env_num_plugins

Ah, shit. Looks like I’m stuck again. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, if any of our readers has ever seen something like this, I could use a couple of pointers.

I swear that I’ve encountered this before…

That is all.

Mad props (to use some ‘hip’ language) to the developers of The Exorcist, a Media View plugin for Songbird that does two things, and does them very well:

• Finds and removes duplicate tracks from a Songbird library.
• Finds and removes ‘ghost’ tracks (files no longer present on the filesystem) from a Songbird library.

These two issues are the most frequent contributors to “iTunes library rot” on my Mac – try as I might, somehow my library always gets desynchronized from the actual filesystem and it’s just easier to rebuild it every few months. The Exorcist looks like it’ll help me avoid this problem!

It’s no secret that Linux, as with any other operating system (and yes, I realize that I just grouped all Linux distributions into a collective) has its idiosyncrasies.  The little things that just sort of make me cock my head to the side and wonder why I’m doing this to myself, or make me want to snap my entire laptop in half.

One of these things is something Tyler previously complained about – a kernel update on Fedora 11 that just happened to tank his graphics capabilities.  Now, I might just be lucky but why in the hell would Fedora release a kernel update before compatibility for two major graphics card manufacturers wasn’t released yet?

Fortunately for Tyler, a kmod-catalyst driver was released for his ATI graphics card yesterday (today?) and he’s now rocking the latest kernel with the latest video drivers.  Unfortunately for me, some slacker has yet to update my kmod-nvidia drivers to operate properly with the latest kernel.

While this is more of a rant than anything else, it’s still a valid point.  I’ve never had trouble on a Windows-based machine wherein a major update will cause a driver to no longer function (short of an actual version incrementation – so of course, I would expect Windows XP drivers to not function in Vista, and Vista drivers to not function in Windows 7; similarly, I would not expect Fedora 11 drivers to function in Fedora 12).

<end rant>

In a nod to Dave’s classic top ten segment I will now share with you the top 10 things I have learned  since starting this experiment one month ago.

10: IRC is not dead

Who knew? I’m joking of course but I had no idea that so many people still actively participated in IRC chats. As for the characters who hang out in these channels… well some are very helpful and some… answer questions like this:

Tyler: Hey everyone. I’m looking for some help with Gnome’s Empathy IM client. I can’t seem to get it to connect to MSN.

Some asshat: Tyler, if I wanted a pidgin clone, I would just use pidgin

It’s this kind of ‘you’re doing it wrong because that’s not how I would do it’ attitude can be very damaging to new Linux users. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get help and someone throwing BS like that back in your face.

9: Jokes about Linux for nerds can actually be funny

Stolen from Sasha’s post.

Admit it, you laughed too

8. Buy hardware for your Linux install, not the other way around

Believe me, if you know that your hardware is going to be 100% compatible ahead of time you will have a much more enjoyable experience. At the start of this experiment Jon pointed out this useful website. Many similar sites also exist and you should really take advantage of them if you want the optimal Linux experience.

7. When it works, it’s unparalleled

Linux seems faster, more featured and less resource hogging than a comparable operating system from either Redmond or Cupertino. That is assuming it’s working correctly…

6. Linux seems to fail for random or trivial reasons

If you need proof of these just go take a look back on the last couple of posts on here. There are times when I really think Linux could be used by everyone… and then there are moments when I don’t see how anyone outside of the most hardcore computer users could ever even attempt it. A brand new user should not have to know about xorg.conf or how to edit their DNS resolver.

5. Linux might actually have a better game selection than the Mac!

Obviously there was some jest in there but Linux really does have some gems for games out there. Best of all most of them are completely free! Then again some are free for a reason…

Armagetron

4. A Linux distribution defines a lot of your user experience

This can be especially frustrating when the exact same hardware performs so differently. I know there are a number of technical reasons why this is the case but things seem so utterly inconsistent that a new Linux user paired with the wrong distribution might be easily turned off.

3. Just because its open source doesn’t mean it will support everything

Even though it should damn it! The best example I have for this happens to be MSN clients. Pidgin is by far my favourite as it seems to work well and even supports a plethora of useful plugins! However, unlike many other clients, it doesn’t support a lot of MSN features such as voice/video chat, reliable file transfers, and those god awful winks and nudges that have appeared in the most recent version of the official client. Is there really that good of a reason holding the Pidgin developers back from just making use of the other open source libraries that already support these features?

2. I love the terminal

I can’t believe I actually just said that but it’s true. On a Windows machine I would never touch the command line because it is awful. However on Linux I feel empowered by using the terminal. It lets me quickly perform tasks that might take a lot of mouse clicks through a cumbersome UI to otherwise perform.

And the #1 thing I have learned since the start of this experiment? Drum roll please…

1. Linux might actually be ready to replace Windows for me

But I guess in order to find out if that statement ends up being true you’ll have to keep following along

A little while ago, I wrote about problems that I was having with my laptop not resolving DNS requests. After I restarted today (because X11 crashed, but that’s a whole other can of worms), it started happening again, even though I had fixed the problem once before. Turns out that the big warning banner at the top of the resolv.conf file was relevant, and that my changes were eventually lost, just not on the first reboot.

So I moved back to my Windows machine for a few minutes to hit up the #debian IRC channel, where I explained my issue and what I had done to solve it last time. Luckily, somebody there presented me with a new solution to the issue that should persist restarts. Instead of making edits directly to resolv.conf, I was instructed to add a prepend line to the /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf file:

#add a prepend line to fix DNS issues
prepend domain-name-servers 64.71.255.202;

Where the IP address is the IP of your DNS server (OpenDNS, in my case). After saving the file, I ran

/etc/init.d/resolvconf restart

to apply the changes and restart the DNS lookup service thinger. I know that doesn’t sound very technical, but I honestly don’t know anything about the part of the network stack in Debian is responsible for DNS lookups, aside from the fact that it may or may not be called resolvconf, so you’ll have to live with it.

In any case, this seems to have worked quite well, so check into it if you’re having problems resolving DNS addresses on your machine.

It’s been about a month now and my computer hasn’t melted down, so this is a good sign. Additionally, I haven’t been forced to drop out of any of my courses due to technical incompetence.

The Good

• Linux Mint is fast as hell. Coming from a Windows background, I’m amazed at how quickly my computer boots up and shuts down. Installing programs is (usually) a breeze, and I rarely have to restart my computer against my will.
• It looks very nice for an open-source OS, and there are a bunch of skins offered.
• I’ve found open source alternatives to pretty much every program I used in Windows. OpenOffice.Org has effectively replaced MS Office, Pidgin matches MSN messenger, and Deluge works just as well as uTorrent.
• Thanks to the easy-to-use installation manager, I can easily download and run new programs. I’ve been introduced to Opera (which is an excellent broswer, as it turns out) and Picasa. Although these run on Windows, the installation process involves more than “click four times”, and there’s no guarantee they’ll load as quickly as they do on Mint.
• I finally understand this joke:

LOL sudo

The Bad

• My media experience has been sub-par at best. My sound only works at about half-capacity, which is fine when I’m hooked up to the speaker system in my room, but it’s frustrating when I have to use the laptop’s native speakers. This is especially annoying since a lot of websites (*cough*youtube) have a wildly inconsistent volume level in their videos, meaning going between two linked videos can be jarring. Video has also been an issue – the media players I’ve tried tend to get choppy whenever I have a menu in fullscreen. Moving the mouse while in fullscreen also briefly flashes my desktop wallpaper and returns to the video. Obviously there is room for improvement here.
• The lockups I experienced were infuriating. I haven’t had any lately (knock on wood), but there are few worse feelings on a computer when you’re halfway through an assignment and a simple google search crashes your computer.
• Mint doesn’t like coming out of hibernate or standy – apparently the kernel just shits the bed. I’ve been told this is an ATI bug that will be fixed in the next kernel upgrade, but I really needed this yesterday.
• I still haven’t gotten my monitor working properly. The display manager crashes whenever I open it, and the ATI Catalyst Control Center isn’t co-operating. Ideally my monitor should be running at 1920×1080, but it’s stuck at 1600×900 for now.

The ohjesusgodWHYYYyyyyy

• A few days ago I experienced a corrupted inode and my computer refused to update or install anything. This was obviously a pretty bad experience and it would’ve taken me hours to figure out what was going on if Tyler and Jake didn’t step in to save the day.

Overall I’m impressed with Mint so far. If it weren’t for the issues I’ve listed in “the bad”, I could see myself using it regularly.

Update: Okay what the hell Mint, I tried to say something nice about you and you go and crash as I’m publishing this post. I guess I’ll amend this infuriating bug.

Another infuriating bug:

• For some reason, Mint will occasionally decide that my desktop is functioning too well. Out of spite, it will shift everything diagonally by N pixels, where N is some number randomly selected from {1,…,1836} (I have very little data to base this on, but I conjecture that this functions on a uniform distribution or the Cauchy distribution, just to be a bitch). Basically, it selects a new spot on my monitor to anchor the bottom left corner of the graphics. At the same time, it forces me to click where I would have clicked before. It looks something like this:

I tried to be nice, but you had to go and do this to me.

So yeah, there go you Mint. Way to ruin this post.

For various reasons, Rhythmbox (the default GNOME audio player) returns this wonderful message, which I’m putting off troubleshooting for the time being:

rhythmbox: error while loading shared libraries: libplds4.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I decided to install Songbird instead. Problem is, I can’t seem to install the Songbird package from the overlay manager, either by unmasking or otherwise. I’m still a bit confused on how to manually install ebuilds as well. Here’s what I ended up doing to get my music collection back up and running:

• Downloaded default Linux package from GetSongbird.
• Extracted package to directory of my choice. Right now it’s sitting in ~/Desktop/Songbird, but I expect to move it to a more appropriate /opt/songbird soon.
• Removed all gstreamer libraries from the main installation as per this comment in the Gentoo bug tracker:

  rm -rf lib/libgst*

• Added Songbird to my GNOME menu in Sound and Video category. I haven’t been able to pick an appropriate icon – any official ones or suggestions?

If you have been following my posts on here you’ll know that I have a very… fragile setup. I am doing everything in my power to ensure that Linux and my ATi graphics card play together nicely. The other day when a new kernel update was pushed out my graphics card update was not ready and I was forced to make a decision: keep the old kernel or lose my graphics. I chose to keep the old kernel.

I just wanted to let everyone know that the code wizards have seen fit to push an update to my card and I know get to use both the newest kernel and to keep my 3D graphics and desktop effects too!

For reference the kernel was 2.6.30.8-64 and the graphics module was kmod-catalyst with matching version number.