the indian wind along the telegraph lines

Back To Ubuntu

When I first got my new x86-64 machine back in late April I decided to run Ubuntu Linux on it. It worked quite well, but I found that updates (especially critical updates like Firefox security patches) were slow in coming. As I run Fedora Core on my server, I ended up switching to that on my desktop as well. But, I have switched back. Click “Read More” to find out why.

One of my closest friends needed a new machine recently, and after I convinced him it would be a poor time to buy a new Mac if he could avoid it (as x86 Macs are around the corner) he opted for an x86-64 machine that dual boots Linux and WinXP. He decided he wanted to try CentOS, the free variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A couple weeks ago I piled myself and a bunch of tools and CDs into the car and headed south to Ashland, OR.

Now, one thing that worked well for me in Ubuntu and has been nothing but a PITA in Fedora is AppleTalk printing. Like me, my friend has an AppleTalk laser printer. I spent (no joke) 6 hours trying to get CentOS to print to the thing. Getting Netatalk working on Red Hat variants is like pulling teeth. It was beyond frustrating.

I eventually installed Ubuntu for him and after re-reading Netatalk docs and sorting through which PAP backend I had actually worked, he could print. It felt … glorious … after the RH debacle.

When I got home last week I rsynced my home directory to a backup drive and installed the i386 variant of Ubuntu (as there is currently no Flash plugin or Sun Java plugin for x86-64). Installation went smoothly, and setting up my AppleTalk printer took … ready? … 2.5 minutes. Two and a half minutes. 150 seconds. Beats the crap out of six hours and no printing.

I’m not knocking Red Hat. They make a great product. But I think their interest in the desktop is minimal. For desktop Linux, I’m now solidly an Ubuntu devotee. It Just Works.

In the interest in giving back to the community I wrote up a step-by-step how-to on AppleTalk on the Ubuntu wiki. If you need AppleTalk services on Linux, check it out.

And hey … Macromedia and Sun. How about x86-64 plugins for Linux folks? Huh? Come on …

Hail Ra!

A few months ago I went off on a rant about Mac hardware prices, the Apple “boutique” experience, and my cogitations on my next machine.

Well, about two weeks ago I asked OSX to do an ls of my mp3s, pipe the output to a text file, and play an mp3 in iTunes at the same time. HFS+ completely pooped itself, the volume information of my Firewire drive was entirely corrupted, and all the data therein went poof.

Fortunately, having been playing with ‘puters for as long as I have, I had (knock wood) a backup. But I was still plenty pissed. There is absolutely no reason that a journalled filesystem asked to do an intense ls read while accessing a file on the volume should explode. None.

And Tiger is around the corner. I’ve heard some ghastly rumors about Spotlight. I’m seeing more interest in feature deployment than feature engineering. It’s gonna cost US$129. It will be dog-slow on the 500Mhz G3 iBook. Yadda yadda yadda. So, what to do?

Thanks to the generosity of my girlfriend and family in the face of an impending birthday, I am now the proud owner of:

• Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra-939
• AMD Athlon64 3200+
• 512MB PC3200 DDR440 RAM
• 250GB Serial ATA drive
• nVidia GeForce FX5200
• Sony DVD/R-RW CD/R-RW
• Antec mini-tower
• Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480w PSU

Along with these major components came a floppy drive, USB keyboard etc etc. Total cost, including shipping, was ~US$730. I built the machine from the assorted parts yesterday, thanks to some speedy shipping from NewEgg and Crucial. The machine is fast. Extremely fast. I have to adjust, I’m not used to apps opening in an instant. But don’t get me wrong, I do not miss the SPOD (Spinning Pinwheel Of Doom).

Installed Ubuntu on it last night (you didn’t think I would buy such a beautiful machine and subject it to Windows, did you?!) and am very much enjoying this Debian-derivative. I have christened it “ra” in keeping with my tradition of naming my machines after Egyptian deities (the server is “aten”).

The only rough spot thus far (knock wood again) has been the fact that iTunes did not actually tag a lot of my mp3s in the way it displayed that it had. For instance, a lot of tracks (but not all) whose track number was blank got a “0” in the actual tag, even though iTunes displayed them as blank. Comment fields that iTunes said were blank actually had things like “000000009382GJH 488402009.” Thanks, iTunes. A lot. It’s fun cleaning up 18,190 mp3 tags. But I must say, the combination of EasyTag and Rhythmbox is making it a lot less painless. And thus far, I much prefer the Rhythmbox UI to iTunes’. With 18K mp3s, Rhythmbox is much easier to navigate.

Before I bore the non-nerdy to tears, although that probably happened as soon as I started spouting specs, I’ll go back to playing in my new world. A big “THANK YOU!” to woo and my family, the Ubuntu community, and drastically less expensive hardware.

I am a happy camper.

Mediahemoth

The news just broke that Adobe is buying out Macromedia. If you have been asleep in a drawer the past 10 years, Adobe makes things like Photoshop and Illustrator and Acrobat. Macromedia makes things like Flash and Dreamweaver.

This could be really great news. The employees could pool their talent and meld the best of competing products like GoLive and Dreamweaver into a single killer app. It could also be that that killer app now costs US$1500 and your firstborn manchild. Or it could suck.

In any event, the software world just lurched on its axis. Time will tell if this will be a boon or boondoggle. For now, just watch for that fourth horseman. Or the rapture.

Fedora Core 4 Test 1 Released

Fedora Core 4 (Test 1) was released yesterday, right on schedule. New to this release is support for the PPC architecture, which is extremely gratifying. While I’ll probably hold off upgrading this x86 server until FC4 final is released, I’m tempted to start playing around with it on one of the Macs.

It also makes me wonder what TerraSoft (Yellow Dog) is thinking right about now. Their PPC distro is Fedora-based, and they have a pay-for product. Is a free Fedora/PPC a threat to their business? What can or will they offer to set their product apart from free offerings? Only time will tell.

If you’re a Mac user curious about Linux, give Fedora a spin. I like it quite a bit.

GNOME 2.10

A little late with this one, as the domain transfer interrupted service.

The GNOME Project has released GNOME 2.10. This is a pretty big incremental release. For a complete list of what’s new, check out the release notes.

I’m looking forward to grabbing this update on the Fedora machine via yum soon. If you’d like to check out 2.10, and don’t want to modify your existing Linux or (gasp) Windows (retch) installation, there’s a Live CD available via BitTorrent.

Check it out!

Colonel Linux In The Conservatory With The Cluebat

One of my biggest spelling pet peeves these days is “kernal.” As in “the Linux kernal.”

It’s kernel, people! K-E-R-N-E-L. Like a kernel of corn. Or the kernel of an idea.

Apparently it’s so bad at this point that dictionary.com feels the need to point the results for “kernal” to “kernel.” The word “kernal” doesn’t even exist in the English language. And yet so many people are getting this wrong that the reference books have to offset the stupidity.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that now the typo is appearing in official job postings. Nothing screams “we don’t know jack squat” like misspelling a basic word. Way to go, Volt. Good luck in your search.

Why not just call it “the Linux colonel” and complete the slow march toward illiteracy?

Super Cool Pic Illusion

Neat. Really, really neat idea. Well executed. And one of those “seems so obvious, why did it take this long?” deals.

Thanks Brazilian.

419 To The Power Of 3

If you have used e-mail for more than 10 seconds you are aware of 419 scams. Someone from Nigeria, or some other African nation, writes to you in utter secrecy and ALL CAPS requesting that you aid them in retrieving money that was lost, inherited or from over-invoiced contracts that is being held by mean and nefarious bankers or a corrupt government.

It’s a scam. I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell anyone that they will not get millions of dollars for doing nothing, but the fact is that common sense is outweighed by avarice these days.

The good news is that this axiom cuts both ways. It turns out that avarice can blind the scammers as much as it can the scammed. A wily American, having received a 419 spam/scam, outwitted the scammers and conned them out of three dollars. A long read, but well worth it. Hilarious.

Score one for the good guys.

Thanks to ond for the heads-up.

Valve Applies The Steam

Computer game maker Valve recently released the much-anticipated Half-Life 2. The first Half-Life was one of the best-received first person shooters in history, and with good reason. It was a great game.

A little more than a year ago, a substantial part of the source code for HL2 was stolen from Valve’s internal servers. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that Valve is now taking theft of their property very seriously.

Playing Half-Life 2 online involves connecting to Valve’s Steam service. This allows you to play against others, and also allows Valve to check the authenticity of your version of the game. The Beeb is reporting that Valve has disabled 20,000 Steam accounts that are using pirated versions. Holy CRAP! The game is out for so short a time, and already Valve can identify and disable 20K stolen versions! Wow. It’s not that I’m surprised at the level of theft, I’m surprised at Valve’s ability to find the pirates. And you know, more power to them. If you want to play, pay. Play fair.

Along the “play fair” lines, while digging deeper into this story I found mention of VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) on the Steam site. It turns out Steam can scan for cheat code applied to the software, and automatically bans accounts for one year that are found to be cheating. To quote their policy:

We will not un-ban you regardless of the reason. It doesn’t matter if someone else used your account, you didn’t know what you were doing was wrong, your brother or sister downloaded a cheat you didn’t know about, etc.

Use of your Steam account is your responsibility.

Gawd, I’d pay money to see the e-mail from the person banned for cheating, has then said that they didn’t know cheating wasn’t allowed, been told by Valve that they’re still banned for a year and complains, “That’s not FAIR!”

Ha! Go Valve!

Firefox Theme Installer

If you don’t know by now that Firefox has gone to a 1.0 revision, I don’t know what rock you’re sleeping under. If you are under a rock, Firefox is a project to tear the web browser guts out of the Netscape code and build a browser (only) that’s fast, standards-compliant and cross platform. I highly suggest you download it and check it out.

I love Firefox, but I found there’s no way to install a theme (a set of files that changes the look and feel) that’s stored on your local drive. Bleh. I don’t want to go to the official Firefox theme pages every time I want to re-install a theme. I want to download once, store it locally and re-install from there. Besides, being on a Mac, I might use Safari to grab a theme or two. What then?

I went looking for something that would allow me to do this, and there are a few different attempts. None of them suited me. So, I tore pieces and parts from some, wrote chunks myself and whipped up a Javascript-enabled page that lets you install a Firefox theme that’s stored on your local disk. I release it to the world under a simple Creative Commons license, embedded in the page. My little contribution to the Firefox effort. Feel free to wget (or whatever) this page and store it on your machine, but remember, no charging for it. Ha! As if …

Click Here to install a Firefox theme from your local drive.