You know, that's interesting, as I'm quite certain that I've installed Eclipse on x86 hardware before...
After successfully compiling and installing the BlueZync for Thunderbird plugin last night, I decided to take a shot at actually synchronizing my Blackberry with Thunderbird. The first step was a little bit of configuration. For that, I followed this guide on the BlueZync website.
Everything was going fine until I got to the section entitled “Mozilla plugin for OpenSync.” In this section, you are instructed to execute the command ldconfig -p | grep libxpcom.so, which checks if the file libxpcom.so is registered as a symlink on your system. After finding out that it was not, I entered the command locate libxpcom.so from a root terminal, and found three locations for the file in question on my system. I then used the line export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/icedove:/usr/lib/iceowl:/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9 to register the symlink. Unfortunately, even after running the export command, ldconfig failed to find the link. Although this one will probably bite me in the ass later on, I’ll skip it for now.
At this point in the install process, I could access the BlueZync settings panel from within Thunderbird, and run the command line osynctool –listplugins and see the mozilla-sync plugin listed, which is the part of the BlueZync suite that really interests me. mozilla-sync is a plugin for OpenSync that should allow me to interface my Blackberry with Thunderbird (with the help of the Barry libraries, which provide another OpenSync plugin that communicates with the phone).
To continue, it was necessary to install all of the elements of the Barry libraries in order to get their OpenSync plugin that would complete the chain. This is where I may have committed my second cardinal sin – dpkg notified me that in order to install the opensync-plugin-barry package, I had to install a version of the libopensync0 package that was between v0.22 and v0.3. As I understand it, Bluezync already installed some version of OpenSync onto my machine, and I have a feeling that reinstalling a different version may ruin all of the progress that I’ve made thus far.
Indeed, after finishing the Barry install and running osynctool –listplugins again, mozilla-sync was still listed, but opensync-plugin-barry was not. This is strange, as in my last three attempts at this process, getting Barry to show up was the easy part. Now the tables have turned, and I have what I assume to be a properly working BlueZync install, but without the Barry component that would make it all work with my phone.
Back to the proverbial drawing board with me…
After some constructive comments from Henrik, the developer of the BlueZync plugin for Thunderbird, I decided to take another shot at getting Blackberry sync working on Linux. This time, instead of making up my own instructions, I actually followed his (which have been updated somewhat since my last visit).
Surprisingly, when I followed the instructions to the letter, the plugin built correctly the first time without any problems. When I launched Icedove (the Debian rebranding of Mozilla Thunderbird), the plugin even loaded correctly! If you’ve read my past posts detailing this process, you’ll feel as incredulous as I did.
The only trouble that I ran into along the way was actually with version 0.9 of the Lightning plugin for Icedove (Thunderbird). Upon installation of the plugin, I was not able to create a calendar, an event, or a task. Turns out that this Ubuntu bug applies to Debian as well, and that the problem can be easily fixed by uninstalling Lightning, downloading and installing the libstdc++5 package, and reinstalling the Lightning plugin. For whatever reason, I could not find this package in the Debian Testing repositories, and instead downloaded and installed it from the Lenny repositories.
With that issue solved, I tried running the ./test-bluezync.sh script, and was met yet again with a slew of failed tests:
21% tests passed, 15 tests failed out of 19
The following tests FAILED:
5 – thunderbird (Failed)
6 – tbird_empty (Failed)
7 – tbird_slow (Failed)
8 – tbird_slow_3 (Failed)
9 – tbird_fast (Failed)
10 – tbird_add (Failed)
11 – tbird_delete (Failed)
12 – tbird_modify (Failed)
13 – light_empty (Failed)
14 – light_slow (Failed)
15 – light_slow_3 (Failed)
16 – light_fast (Failed)
17 – light_add (Failed)
18 – light_delete (Failed)
19 – light_modify (Failed)
However, unlike in past attempts at this install, this time the Bluezync plugin is visible from within Thunderbird… Now all I have to figure out is how to use it. More on that later.
Oh come on, everyone else is doing it.
You can even visit us on Karmic Koala. What doesn't it do?
Love it or hate it Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution to date. While we at The Linux Experiment have not included it amongst our chosen distributions, many of us have had experience with it in the past and look forward to seeing the new features that have been lovingly baked into this release.
Congrats to Canonical et al. for delivering Karmic Koala, hopefully another great version of their staple distribution.
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!
I mentioned in the podcast that I was having problems viewing Flash stuff in Firefox and I blamed it on KDE. I may have jumped the gun here, because the same issue started cropping up in GNOME. I went on the Linux Mint forums and other users were having similar issues. I’ve run the code that they suggested in the terminal, but I’m not sure if it worked because the problem doesn’t manifest instantly – sometimes it takes over half an hour before websites that run flash white themselves out.
Wine, or W.I.N.E. Is Not an Emulator, is a set of compatibility libraries that allow some Windows applications to run pseudo naively on Linux by mapping Windows API calls to native Linux calls. In the past I have been sort of successful with using Wine but I have never really given it a good go. So I decided that I should put Wine through it’s paces!
Rather than approach this from an expert’s standpoint I am going to use Wine starting from a novice’s ability and then move up if needed.
I have selected a number of different applications to test with Wine – some productive software and some games. I have done no research as to the compatibility of these programs under Wine, they just happen to be easy to use for testing, so it’s going to be a surprise for me no matter what happens. As I’m sure you can tell it’s been a while since I’ve played games on my PC…
First thing we need to do is make sure Wine is installed!
How to install Wine on Fedora 11
Technically all you need to do is:
sudo yum install wine
but you might want to install some of the additional packages as well, just in case!
Now that EA has released this game as free getting a copy of it was a simple download. Once downloaded and unzipped I mounted it and tried running the autorun script.
Red Alert autorun
Error
Sadly this resulted in the above error. Next I tried opening it using a simple double-click on the SETUP.EXE. This launched the program but gave me the following error message:
5.1 = Windows XP?
1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE
With that failure I decided to try and run it from the terminal so that I would at least be able to see errors in the print outs.
wine SETUP.EXE
This however only resulted in the same error message.
2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILURE
If this problem is truly related to the fact that it thinks I’m running Windows XP maybe I can change that. So off to the Wine configuration menu I went and lo and behold I found an option to do just that!
You can even set different programs to think they are running on different versions of Windows!
This time I got a different error message about not being able to find all of the files. I decided to burn the ISO to a disc to eliminate any problems with the way I mounted it. Putting the newly burned disc into the drive and using the terminal to launch autorun.exe made everything work and the installation finished. A simple click of the menu icon and I was playing Red Alert!
3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: SUCCESS
Command & Conquer: Red Alert Final Result: SUCCESS
Well that wasn’t so bad. Let’s try the others!
The first thing I did was pop the CD in the computer.
In goes SimCity 3000 Unlimited
Autorun
Which promptly gave me this:
Nothing could be that easy...
I even tried browsing to the setup exe’s location and running it directly. Still no luck.
Stop teasing me!
1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILED
Next I tried to run the game from the terminal. I navigated to the setup folder and ran the exe with wine.
cd /media/SIMCITY3000/SETUP/ENGLISH/
wine SETUP.EXE
To my amazement this resulted in the installer starting correctly! A couple of quick Next button clicks and some typing of my serial key and the game began to install. Exactly 3 minutes later the game was finished installing. I then navigated to the application through the GNOME menubar:
Applications > Wine > Programs > Maxis > SimCity 3000 Unlimited > SimCity 3000 Unlimited
Holding my breath I clicked the button and… nothing. Hmm. Turning back to the terminal I browsed to the location where Wine installed SimCity on my hard drive and ran the program from there.
cd /home/tyler/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Maxis/SimCity\ 3000\ Unlimited/Apps/
wine sc3U.exe
This presented me with the following error screen… about 30 times until I killed it from the terminal.
I just kept on getting this error message... over and over and over and over...
2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILED
I looked around in the Wine settings and couldn’t find anything that would be causing the game to fail so miserably so I gave up on this step.
3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: FAILED
Turning to the web I quickly looked up “SimCity 3000″ on Wine’s App DB. From the look of things SimCity 3000 works with Wine but SimCity 3000 Unlimited does not.
4. Search the web for ideas and consult Wine’s App DB: FAILED
SimCity 3000 Unlimited Final Result: FAILED
Try as I might SimCity 3000 Unlimited just does not work under Wine.
Once again I started by inserting the CD-ROM and tried to run the autorun that popped up.
Will this work better than SimCity?
Will this autorun work?
CRAP!
Next I tried once again browsing to the CD-ROM in Nautilus.
Do I run autoplay.exe?
Or maybe Setup.exe? Or even Stronghold.exe?
Unfortunately once again no success using the graphical shell.
1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE
After that, and recognizing the limited success I had with SimCity, I repeated the steps but this time using the terminal. To my surprise the installer appeared!
cd /media/030819_1208/
wine autoplay.exe
A little over 4 minutes later the game finished installing and I was presented with the launch screen. Again I held my breath and clicked on Play. It launched! Holy crap it’s actually working… well… sort of. Something wasn’t quite right so I closed the application and opened up Wine configuration. In that window I checked the box next to “emulate a virtual desktop” and set the resolution to 800×600. Once again I restarted Stronghold… GREAT SUCCESS! It worked flawlessly!
2. Try and run program from terminal: SUCCESS
Stronghold Final Result: SUCCESS
Stronghold proves that Wine is capable of providing a seemingly fully compatible Windows experience.
After a quick download from the SourceForge website I began, again, by trying to run the installer from the graphical shell.
Can you guess what happened next?
1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE
Back to the command line I went and after entering the typical commands I was once again presented with the installer.
cd ~/Desktop/
wine npp.5.5.1.Installer.exe
By this point I honestly don’t know why Wine has a graphical launch option or why it fails so badly. Less than a minute later, using the terminal, Notepad++ was up and running perfectly, albeit with some odd graphical issues.
Notice how the text doesn't look quite right?
2. Try and run program from terminal: SUCCESS
Notepad++ Final Result: SUCCESS
While not without its odd graphical problems, Notepad++ seems completely stable and quite usable on the Linux desktop.
After three successes I was on a roll and jumped over to the µTorrent website in anticipation of another success.
I’ll save you the details,
1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE
Turning to the trusty terminal (wow that was a lot of t-words) I started up utorrent.exe with Wine.
wine utorrent.exe
The install went fine and even placed a desktop launcher on my desktop when I clicked the ‘Create Desktop Icon’ box. Running the application proved to be a bit more challenging and when I tried to run it from Wine’s Program Files using the following command,
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/uTorrent/uTorrent.exe
I was presented with some rather odd behaviour in the form of another installation. In fact no matter what I did I couldn’t get it to work.
2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILURE
Again I poked around in the Wine settings but there just didn’t seem to be anything in there that would help.
3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: FAILURE
Getting frustrated I turned to the internet, specifically Wine’s App DB, for help. I tried following a number of suggestions but nothing seemed to work. I even ended up on µTorrent’s Wikipedia page but still nothing. On a funny note, Wikipedia lists µTorrent’s platforms as “Wine officially supported”.
4. Search the web for ideas and consult WINE’s App DB: FAILURE
µTorrent Final Result: FAILURE
Try as I might I just can’t get this BitTorrent client to work properly.
Once again I started by using the graphical shell – although I honestly didn’t believe it would work. And guess what?
1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE
Following the pattern I tried the terminal next. This started up the application but ended abruptly when IE prompted me saying that “This installation does not support your system architecture (32/64 bits)”. That doesn’t make sense though because the Internet Explorer I downloaded was for x86…
2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILURE
Poking around again in Wine’s configuration proved to be fruitless. There just didn’t seem to be any way to tell it to run the application as x86.
3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: FAILURE
Finally I turned to the web and searched the App DB for Internet Explorer 8. This made it pretty clear that I wasn’t going to get IE 8 to work under Wine as every version listed, aside from 1.0 and 1.5, had a rating of Garbage – Wine’s worst compatibility rating.
4. Search the web for ideas and consult Wine’s App DB: FAILURE
Internet Explorer 8 Final Result: FAILURE
I guess Microsoft’s iconic browser was just not meant to play nicely with Tux.
I have put Wine through its paces and while there were quite a bit of failures I am very impressed. Wine might just spark a trip down memory lane with my favorite Windows game classics!
Editor’s note: This, as everything we write on The Linux Experiment, is an opinion piece. I fully recognize that some people may be quite happy with having KDE, Harbinger of Doom, in their lives as an every day desktop environment. Who knows? Maybe if KDE had been my first user experience with Linux – back in my early days with Ubuntu – I would have enjoyed it a little more. For now, I love Gnome. I will continue using Gnome until such a time that KDE decides to stop sucking the fattest of donkey penises.
My absolute first experience with KDE – about a week and a half ago, for this experience – did not start well. Upon initial boot, I discovered that I had absolutely no sound. Great, I thought! Let’s just un-mute this [particular distribution] and get started.
KDE [random alternative acronym] dealt its first lethal [hit] across my face at this point. Nowhere in the Multimedia settings did I have the ability to switch my default sound device, and no manner of muting / un-muting my audio device could get anything to work. Thanks to Tyler’s initial problems with audio though, I was able to – after twenty minutes of tinkering – get some audio all up in this piece.
That amounts to about all of the success I’ve had with KDE so far. Thanks to another one of Tyler’s posts I was just able to get touchpad clicking working, but check out this full list of things that don’t work in KDE that definitely work (now) in my Gnome desktop environment:
Among other things, reduced battery life (even with the – and yes I will admit this – awesome application that is PowerDevil) and a ridiculously elongated boot time are not subtracting from my ever-burgeoning list of frustrations.
I know that some of you were maybe hoping for something a little longer than this (that’s what she said!) but I can’t honestly vent all of my frustrations here - I clearly have to save some of it for the podcast on Sunday. Listen closely as you hear me completely nerdgasm over my ability to use Gnome again.
Well, again, it’s been a little while since my last post. I hope you all enjoyed the podcast that we put out the week before last. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, make sure to do so by going here. We had a lot of interesting discussions regarding the experiment. If you have any comments about the podcast, or there is anything you want to see, you can either leave a comment, or shoot me an email.
LINUX IS INSTALLED ONCE AGAIN
After approximately 46.3 attempts at installing openSUSE on my Asus eeePC, it is finally installed. With the help of Jake B. and Windows, we finally managed to get it working. It took only several hours of both of us cursing, and nearly an entire 24 of Stella, but it is working.
WELL, WORKING IS A RELATIVE TERM
I hate KDE more than I hate Differential Equations, and as Jon F. can probably confirm, I really hate Differential Equations. That being said, besides Sasha D, who doesn’t hate Differential Equations?
KDE just makes everything so difficult. With Gnome, most of the applications mesh well with the interface. However, with KDE, I have a hard time even getting some applications to mesh with it at all. Pidgin looks absolutely terrible. The message font doesn’t match up with what my system font is set to, and I did not have this issue with GNOME.
I don’t want any damn widgets… this isn’t a Mac!
I WANT MY GNOME BACK!!!
Screen-shots to follow… that is if KDE will let me do that.
As part of our experiment, everyone is required to try a different desktop manager for two weeks. I chose KDE, since I’ve been using GNOME since I installed openSUSE. However, I’ve found that while trying to get a desktop manager set up one wrong move can cause everything to fall apart.
Switching from GNOME:
This was fairly simple. I started up YaST Software Management, changed my filter from “Search” to “Patterns”, and found the Graphical Environments section. Here I right clicked “KDE Base System”, and selected install. Clicking accept installed the kdebase and kdm packages, with a slew of other KDE default programs. Once this was done, I logged out of my GNOME session, and selected KDE4 as my new login session. My system was slightly confused and booted into GNOME again, so I restarted. This time, I was met with KDE 4.1.
My Thoughts on KDE 4.1:
As much as I had hated the qt look [which I erronously call the 'quicktime' look, due to its uncanny similarity to the quicktime app], the desktop was beautiful. The default panel was a very slick, glossy black, which looked quite nice. The “lines” in each window title made the windowing system very ugly, so I set out to turn them off. Its a fairly easy process:
KDE Application Launcher > Configure Desktop > Appearance > Windows > Uncheck the “Show stripes next to the title” box.
Once completed, my windows were simple and effective, and slightly less chunky than the default GNOME theme, so I was content.
Getting rid of the openSUSE Branding:
openSUSE usually draws much ire from me – so its not hard to imagine that I’d prefer not to have openSUSE branding on every god damn application I run, least of all my Desktop Manager. From YaST Software Management I searched for openSUSE and uninstalled every package that had the words “openSUSE” and “branding”. YaST automatically replaces these packages with alternate “upstream” packages, which seem to be the non-openSUSE themes/appearances. Once these were gone, things looked a lot less gray-and-green, and I was happy.
Oh god what happened to my login screen:
A side effect of removing all those openSUSE packages my login screen took a trip back in time, to the Windows 3.1 era. It was a white window on a blue background with Times New Roman-esque font. After a bit of researching on the GOOG, I found out that this was KDE3 stepping up to take over for my openSUSE branding. Uninstalling the package kde3base or whatever the shit it’s called forced KDE4 to take over, and everything was peachy again.
Installing my Broadcom Wirless Driver
In order to install my driver, I followed this guide TO THE LETTER. Not following this guide actually gave YaST a heart attack and created code conflicts.
KMix Being Weird
KMix magically made my media buttons on my laptop work, however it occasionally decided to change what “audio device” the default slider was controlling. Still, having the media buttons working was a HUGE plus.
Getting Compositing to Work
I did not have a good experience with this. Infact, by fucking around with settings, I ended up bricking my openSUSE install entirely. So alas, I ended up completely re-installing openSUSE. Regardless, to install ATI drivers, follow the guide here using the one-click install method worked perfectly. After finally getting my drivers, turning on compositing was simple:
KDE Application Launcher > Configure Desktop > Appearance > Desktop > Check the “Enable Desktop Effects” box.
From KDE4.1 to KDE4.3
While KDE was really working for me, the notifications system was seriously annoying. Every time my system had an update, or a received a message in Kopete an ugly, plain, slightly off center, gray box would appear at the top of my screen to inform me. Tyler informed me that this was caused by the fact that I wasn’t running the most recent version of KDE4. A quick check showed me that openSUSE isn’t going to use KDE4.3 until openSUSE 11.2 launches, however you can manually add the KDE 4.3 repositories to YaST, as shown on the openSUSE KDE Repository page.
After adding these repositories, I learned a painful lesson in upgrading your display manager. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt a Display Manager upgrade/switch untill you have an hour to spare, and enough battery life to last the whole time. I did not, and even though I cancelled the install about 60 seconds in, I found that YaST had already uninstalled my display manager. Upon restart, I was met with a terminal.
From the terminal, I used the command line version of YaST to completely remove kdebase4 and kdm from my system. After that, re-installing the KDE4.3 verison of kdm from YaST in the terminal installed all the other required applications. However, there are a shitload of dependency issues you gotta sort through and unfortunately the required action is not the same for each application.
KDE4.3
KDE4.3 is absolutely gorgeous, I’ve had no complaints with it. KMix seems to have reassigned itself again, but it assigned itself correctly. Removing the openSUSE branding was the same, but by default the desktop theme used is Air. I prefer the darker look of Oxygen, so I headed over to my desktop to fix it by following these steps:
Desktop > Right Click > Plain Desktop Settings > Change the Desktop Theme from Air to Oxygen.
Concluding Thoughts
Now that all these things are sorted out, I’m surprisingly impressed with KDE, and I might even keep it at the end of this test period for our podcast.
Let me know if you’ve ever had to change desktop managers and your woes in the comments!
KDE4.1
uninstall openSUSE branding, except the KDM one maybe?
uninstall kde3base or whatever the shit it’s called. this makes stuff wicked.
KDE4.3
This might have all been unessecary. since installing KDE4.3, I did it all again to no avail. Rightclick desktop, plain desktop settings, theme: oxygen. Then hooray its fine?
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