The Linux Experiment

Well I managed to fix my compositing problem but I honestly don’t know why it worked. Basically I went into the System Settings > Desktop > Desktop Effects menu and manually turned off all desktop effects. Next I used jockey-text to disable the ATI driver. After a quick restart I re-enabled the ATI driver and restarted again. Once I logged in I went back into the System Settings > Desktop > Desktop Effects menu and enabled desktop effects. This magically worked… but only until I restarted. In order to actually get it to start enabled I had to go back into System Settings > Desktop > Desktop Effects and then click on the Advanced tab and then disable functionality checks. I am sure this is dangerous or something but its the only way I can get my computer to restart with the effects enabled by default.

I’m really starting to hate this graphics card…

With the linux experiment coming to an end, and my Vista PC requiring a reinstall, I decided to take the leap and go all linux all the time. To that end, I’ve installed Kubuntu on my desktop PC.

I would like to be able to report that the Kubuntu install experience was better than the Debian one, or even on par with a Windows install. Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case.

My machine contains three 500GB hard drives. One is used as the system drive, while an integrated hardware RAID controller binds the other two together as a RAID1 array. Under Windows, this setup worked perfectly. Under Kubuntu, it crashed the graphical installer, and threw the text-based installer into fits of rage.

With plenty of help from the #kubuntu IRC channel on freenode, I managed to complete the Kubuntu install by running it with the two RAID drives disconnected from the motherboard. After finishing the install, I shut down, reconnected the RAID drives, and booted back up. At this point, the RAID drives were visible from Dolphin, but appeared as two discrete drives.

It was explained to me via this article that the hardware RAID support that I had always enjoyed under windows was in fact a ‘fake RAID,’ and is not supported on Linux. Instead, I need to reformat the two drives, and then link them together with a software RAID. More on that process in a later post, once I figure out how to actually do it.

At this point, I have my desktop back up and running, reasonably customized, and looking good. After trying KDE’s default Amarok media player and failing to figure out how to properly import an m3u playlist, I opted to use Gnome’s Banshee player for the time being instead. It is a predictable yet stable iTunes clone that has proved more than capable of handling my library for the time being. I will probably look into Amarok and a few other media players in the future. On that note, if you’re having trouble playing your MP3 files on Linux, check out this post on the ubuntu forums for information about a few of the necessary GStreamer plugins.

For now, my main tasks include setting up my RAID array, getting my ergonomic bluetooth wireless mouse working, and working out folder and printer sharing on our local Windows network. In addition, I would like to set up a Windows XP image inside of Sun’s Virtual Box so that I can continue to use Microsoft Visual Studio, the only Windows application that I’ve yet to find a Linux replacement for.

This is just the beginning of the next chapter of my own personal Linux experiment; stay tuned for more excitement.

This post first appeared at Index out of Bounds.

Looks being the key word there because I haven’t actually been able to successfully run either of  these seemingly awesome pieces of software.

Amahi is the name of an open source software collection, for lack of a better term, that resembles what Windows Home Server has to offer. I first came across this while listening to an episode of Going Linux (I think it was episode #85 but I can’t remember anymore!) and instantly looked it up. Here is a quick rundown of what Amahi offers for you:

• Currently built on top of Fedora 10, but they are hoping to move it to the most recent version of Ubuntu
• Audio streaming to various apps like iTunes and Rhythmbox over your home network
• Media streaming to other networked appliances including the Xbox 360
• Acts as a NAS and can even act as a professional grade DHCP server (taking over the job from your router) making things even easier
• Built in VPN so that you can securely connect to your home network from remote locations
• SMB and NFS file sharing for your whole network
• Provides smart feedback of your drives and system, including things like disk space and temperature
• Built-in Wiki so that you can easily organize yourself with your fellow co-workers, roommates or family members
• Allows you to use the server as a place to automate backups to
• Windows, Mac & Linux calendar integration, letting you share a single calendar with everyone on the network
• Implements the OpenSearch protocol so that you can add the server as a search location in your favorite browser. This lets you search your server files from right within your web browser!
• Includes an always-on BitTorrent client that lets you drop torrent files onto the server and have it download them for you
• Supports all Linux file systems and can also read/write to FAT32 and read from NTFS.
• Sports a plugin architecture that lets developers expand the platform in new and exciting ways
• Inherits all of the features from Fedora 10
• Finally Amahi offers a free DNS service so you only have to remember a web address, not your changing home IP address

FreeNAS is a similar product, although I use that term semi-loosely seeing as it is also open source, except instead of being based on Linux, FreeNAS is currently based on FreeBSD 7.2. Plans are currently in the works to fork the project and build a parallel Linux based version. Unlike Amahi, FreeNAS sticks closer to the true definition of a NAS and only includes a few additional features in the base install, letting the user truly customize it to their needs. Installed it can take up less than 64MB of disk space. It can (through extensions) include the following features:

• SMB and NFS as well as TFTP, FTP, SSH, rsync, AFP, and UPnP
• Media streaming support for iTunes and Xbox 360
• BitTorrent support allowing you to centralize your torrenting
• Built-in support for Dynamic DNS through major players like DynDNS, etc.
• Includes full support for ZFS, UFS, ext2, ext3. Can also fully use FAT32 (just not install to), and can read from NTFS formatted drives.
• Small enough footprint to boot from a USB drive
• Many supported hardware and software RAID levels
• Full disk encryption via geli

Both of these can be fully operated via a web browser interface and seem very powerful. Unfortunately I was unable to get either up and running inside of a VirtualBox environment. While I recognize that I could just install a regular Linux machine and then add most of these features myself, it is nice to see projects like that package them in for ease of use.

This is definitely something that I will be looking more closely at in the future; you know once these pesky exams are finished. In the mean time if anyone has any experience with either of these I would love to hear about it.

[UPDATE]

While publishing this, the folks over at Amahi sent out an e-mail detailing many new improvements. Turns out they released a new version now based on Fedora 12. Here are their notable improvements:

• Amahi in the cloud! This release has support for VPS servers (Virtual Private Servers).
• Major performance and memory improvements, providing a much faster web interface and a 30% smaller memory footprint.
• Based on Fedora 12, with optimizations for Atom processors built-in, preliminary support in SAMBA for PDC (Primary Domain Controller) with Windows 7 clients and much more.
• Completely revamped web-based installer.
• Users are more easily and securely setup now, the with password-protected pages and admin users.
• Brand new architecture, with future growth in mind, supporting more types of apps, and more importantly, bring us closer to supporting Ubuntu and other platforms. Over 100+ apps are working in this release out of the gates!

It all sounds great. I will be looking into this new version as soon as I have a moment to do so.

I would just like to point out that thanks to you the readers, who I’d like to reinforce are fantastic and have been a huge help to us (as well as making us feel good that people are making use of the site!) have catapulted us to previously unknown heights in the world of Canadian search engine fame!

The big three search engines with Canadian domains – Google, Bing, and Yahoo – have all launched us up to top-shelf status on their search pages with a search string of ‘The Linux Experiment’:

Bing.ca – first search result (yay!)

Yahoo.ca – first search result (double yay!)

Google.ca – second search result (darn you, PC World)

Let’s collectively step it up and get us to the top of the Google search charts.  With a scant 38 days left in the Experiment, time is quickly running out!

Today, the search engines… tomorrow, the (PC) world!

Well, it’s official – twelve more days remain until the November 17 release of Fedora 12 (Constantine).  I, for one, can hardly wait – Fedora 11 has been rock-solid for me so far (under Gnome, anyways – but I’ll leave that subject alone) and I can only imagine that Fedora 12 is going to bring more of the same my way.

Among some of the more notable changes being made that caught my interest:

• Gnome 2.28 – the current version bundled into my Fedora 11 distribution, 2.26.3, has been nothing but amazing.  Unflinchingly stable, fast, and reliable – it’s everything I want in a desktop environment.
• Better webcam support – not sure how this can get any better from my perspective since my LG P300′s built-in webcam worked straight out of the box on Fedora 11, but I’m interested to see exactly what they bring to the table here
• Better IPv6 support – since our router does actively support this protocol, it’s nice to see Fedora taking charge and always improving the standard
• Better power management – for me, this is a major headache under Gnome (I know, I know…) since it really doesn’t let me customize anything as much as I would like to.   Among other things, it’s supposed to offer better support for wake-from-disk and wake-from-RAM.  We’ll see.

I’m sure that Tyler and I will keep you posted as the due date gets closer, and especially once we’ve done the upgrade itself!

I stumbled across a very interesting post linked off of Digg, which I browse on a fairly regular basis.  In it, the author attempts to put to rest some of the more common (and, for the most part, completely inaccurate) stories that revolve around various Linux distributions.

Though I think Jake B might have something to say about the first point on the list, it made for interesting reading at the very least – and for the most part, I agree with the author wholeheartedly.  Link after the jump!

Debunking Some Linux Myths

One of my big griefs with Mint was that the sound was far too quiet. I assumed this was some sort of hardware compatibility issue. Apparently it’s not and it’s really easy to fix. Essentially, the default “front speaker” volume is not at the max level. While this has given me a great max volume, my latest problem is getting Mint to increment/decrement the volume properly – the master volume is essentially muted at 70%. That being said, I’m glad I can finally watch online videos from my laptop without needing headphones or a soundproof room.

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.

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>