I took the plunge into Hardy Heron already. So far I have mainly good things to report. I had issues getting the NVidia driver to work right with my 8800 GTS 512, but after utterly uninstalling the one that envy installed under Gutsy Gibbon and installing the NVidia driver through recovery root prompt with a -f to force installation, the driver's installated fine. Another hardware-related issue arose from btnx, which I used to map a couple mouse buttons, seeming to be a little confused. I had to redetect buttons, for example, then the newly remapped buttons work fine in most things, except that Firefox doesn't seem to be consistent with it. I'll have to experiment more to see if I can figure out what's happening.

But as I said, so far, mostly so good. I want to play with the new task scheduling to see if I can break it. Seems like CPU usage with BOINC using no more than 80% of the CPU is a bit odd. I mean to say that CPU usage had a pattern when looking at the System Monitor in Gutsy, but not so much in Hardy, where both CPU cores tend to stick around 100% usage more of the time... Ah, I forgot about the file indexing, that's probably rolling in the background and since I turned off the indexer tray icon I'm just not seeing it. Durr.

The Firefox 3 beta that's included with Hardy needs some more work, but I expect updates to come in as the application's development reaches release. Inclusion of a beta as a main browser in a desktop OS is a bit odd to me, but it's just about fully baked, so no biggie.

Seems like Hardy's a touch more responsive than Gutsy, but I haven't pushed it hard, as I said above. I think the thing I like most about Hardy is the commitment to be supported for three years.

Now I'm off to play with multimedia apps to see how they do.

Got a new 500 gig hard drive the other day to replace the 120 gigger I've had for long time. I knew it would be rough replacing my existing hard drive with another one thanks to my dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configuration, but I wanted to do the deed to learn what was involved. I'm funny that way about computers.

The story that follows is primarily geared toward techies. Other readers may want to leave the entry now, heheh.

Tools used: Ubuntu Gutsy AMD 64-bit CD, Recovery is Possible Linux boot CD, Windows XP Pro original setup CD.

Both drives are SATA drives, and because of the way that the SATA controllers are physically placed on my motherboard, my old drive is seen by Linux as /dev/sda2, while my new drive was /dev/sda1. Since my motherboard BIOS has a setting for which hard drive to boot from, this is fine.

I started by adding the new drive into the system and booting up under Ubuntu. I ran gparted to partition the new drive. Since my original drive was initially formatted as a single NTFS partition, then I added Ubuntu on as a dual-boot, my first partition is the NTFS Windows partition, second partition is ext3 for Ubuntu, and then I have an extended partition with 2.5 gigs of Linux swap space. I mirrored this setup on the new drive, roughly matching the proportions of the NTFS and ext3 partitions but leaving 3 gigs for swap space.

I rebooted the system into Ubuntu Gutsy using the Live CD so I could manipulate file systems "from on high". I can't express how cool Live CDs are to me now. Anyway, I copied the old Windows and Ubuntu data to the proper new partitions using rsync. Here's where I blew it on the Windows side to start with, but more about that later.

I had the presence of mind after reading some other Ubuntu hard drive upgrade stories to find out the uuid of the new partitions and edit both the /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab files on the new drive to update their uuid entries with the new partition information. Note for the future: Looking under /dev/[disk]/by-uuid/ you find links to the /dev/[partition] so you can figure out which uuid goes to what partition without guessing. Lost about an hour to guessing on those before I figured that one out.

I rebooted using the Recovery Is Possible (RIP) CD, which I now highly recommend in any Linux user's toolkit. I dropped to a command line from GRUB (type "c") and typed in "setup (hd0) (hd0,1)" to install GRUB into the new MBR and tell it to look at the second partition on the drive for boot information (remember Windows is on the first partition). That went fine.

Then I pulled the old hard drive out of the configuration and booted into Ubuntu Gutsy. Bada boom, bada bing.

Windows wasn't booting right yet, because I hadn't put system information on the Windows partition yet. DOH! So I booted up the Windows XP setup CD, told it to reformat the first partition, and let it start installing off the CD. There's a point partway through the XP installation where it restarts the system to boot from the hard drive and install more off the CD. This was where I pulled the CD out of the drive and booted instead into the RIP CD configuration, because at this point I know the Windows XP system information has been written. I also know that in the process, XP has overwritten the master boot record with its own boot information, so I redid the GRUB setup trick from the RIP CD again and rebooted into my Ubuntu Gutsy configuration. The Windows XP partition mounted as usual because I have it automount on startup in Ubuntu Gutsy, so I rsync'd files from the old Windows configuration to the new one, then rebooted the system into Windows XP. There have been a few hiccups with Windows, notably things like the desktop.ini files showing up all over the place because they aren't hidden anymore, and the recycle bin got corrupted, but overall things look like they're playing well. Why? rsync probably didn't keep Windows file attributes, my attempt at getting at the Windows admin password through an Ultimate Boot CD utility to boot into a Windows XP recovery console mangled some parts of the registry, or both. Either way, I'll probably copy old to new through Windows XP next time.

So the new drive's now running both my Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configurations and I've pulled out the old drive to keep as a spare. The new drive's noticeably faster than the previous one, which is nice. Total time on the upgrade, including headscratching and booboo resolution was about a day. Total work time was probably about 8 hours, most of which was copying files hither and yon.

This exercise has shown me a few things. I have a much better understanding of Linux's hard drive "guts" and where in Ubuntu to look for device and boot configuration data. Ubuntu is easier to migrate than Windows XP. I don't think I have a use for the Ultimate Boot CD anymore, much as I used to like it. Recovery Is Possible is an excellent resource for Linux hard drive upgrades and recovery. Most importantly, though, I now know that I can rebuild my entire configuration from backups if there's a catastrophic meltdown. This last one makes me mighty happy, and I feel like my Ubuntu-fu is almost as good as my Windows-fu now. Am I going to get Vista-fu? I'll try not to for as long as possible. I'll just keep getting mo' better with Ubuntu.

I did a quick review of this blog just for grins and was surprised to see that it's been going for almost two years now. So I survived all of 2007 without running some version of BBS or forum, the longest lapse in doing so in a couple of decades. I miss it sometimes. Other times I think about the amount of time I spent on it vs. the amount of time I have to do such things now. Still, it was a great social thing for me, and I don't regret much of the time spent at all. I wouldn't be nearly as good at figuring out how to do things on computers without that experience, wouldn't have my excellent stepdaughters because I wouldn't have met my first wife, and just wouldn't be me without having run The Place of Magic.

I know it's cliche to look back on the past at the beginning of a new year, but I think it's important to see where you've been to try to keep the journey so far in perspective so it's easier to focus on what's ahead. Unfortunately for me, there's a lot of regret involved in some of my past decisions. I was young for too long... heheh. But again, I wouldn't be me if I hadn't done things the way I have, and I'm pretty happy with me right now. Overall.

But enough about that, I've been considering some system upgrades lately that are much more interesting. I made the mistake of buying Unreal Tournament 3 recently and while it's playable on my system, my nearly two-year-old video card's just not up to the task of displaying sci-fi violence with Unreal Engine 3. The NVidia 6800GS-based card's treated me extremely well, even better than my last ATi card did for its "lifetime". I have my eyes on an NVidia 8800GTS video card with 320 megs of RAM, but other than playing this one game, I don't have a reason to upgrade. Really, I don't. Compiz Fusion is fine under Gnome with a considerable amount of visual bling, I just have the ol' hardware lust thing going again. I should put the money toward credit card payments. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

So the next day after writing the above I got a new video card in NVidia's 8800 line. While Windows XP installation was a breeze, Ubuntu seemed to fight every step of the way, first by blanking the screen out and turning my monitor off while the opening splash screen was going, and then by beating down just about every attempt I made to get the video drivers installed. I even installed links, the text Web browser, so I could search the Web because I couldn't get X to come up consistently.

Many thanks to the Ubuntu support forums and posts from the developers of Envy for helping me to resolve these two issues. The last issue I ran into was that the currently-released NVidia driver for this card pegs the fan speed at 100% and sounding like yet another jet engine of dooooom. The latest beta of nvclock has the option to force this particular card into auto fan speed mode, which is very quiet, but getting nvclock set up was a bit problematic as well, including a brief trip through dependency hell. I Learned Stuff Overall.

How's the video card? It's so fast I hardly even see it. Unbelievable. Unnecessary. But awesome. Half-Life 2 with everything turned all the way up is smooth as silk. Unreal Tournament 3, too. And everything else I have on here.

So back to reading things. I have trouble reading non-nerdiness and nerding at the same time.

This post saved without links so you guys can give Google a bit more of a workout.

Things around here are getting close to whatever passes for normal. I've been reading a bit, but most of my extra time's been going into fiddling with Ubuntu. As a result, I have a good Ubuntu pointing device configuration story for the nerdy.

As some of you may know, multi-button pointing device manufacturers spend their time creating good button configuration utilities and drives for Windows and sometimes Macs. Hardly any of them create Linux configurators for their devices. While Linux programs are available that allow for absolutely incredible pointing device configuration, solutions that mimic the functionality of Windows or Mac configurators end up being Frankensteinian combinations of multiple Linux tools. Most involve relating the results of a lot of trial and error. This is such a story.

I've been wrestling with having a not-fully-to-my-liking pointing device configuration for months now, battling with it off and on without success until this morning. A special shout-out is in order for two Web resources: This page gave me a couple of vital pieces of information I needed. Coupled with the excellent btnx application, the keys to the kingdom were mine, so to speak. btnx in particular is an awesome weapon in the Linux mouse configuration arsenal, but on to the story.

I use a USB Microsoft Trackball Explorer these days for my pointing needs. You might want to keep that picture up while I describe what I'm doing here. There are two buttons near the thumb, one large lower one and a smaller one above it. I'll call the two thumb buttons "big thumb" and "little thumb". A mousewheel sits between the two thumb buttons. Two more buttons sit to the right of the trackball, one under where my ring finger normally is, and one under my pinky. I'll call these "ring" and "pinky" buttons.

So the device has four "normal" buttons and a scroll wheel, which counts as three buttons (the wheel button itself, wheel up, and wheel down are all treated as buttons). That's a total of seven buttons, right? Actually, Linux picks up nine buttons on the device. My testing has determined that any button configured as button 6 will browse backward in Firefox, and button 7 is a browse forward. However, none of the buttons on my configuration normally map as buttons 6 or 7. The ring and pinky are buttons 8 and 9 according to xev. Go figure.

The normal configuration for the Trackball Explorer is for the big thumb button to left-click and the little thumb button to right-click. The ring and pinky buttons are set up as back and forward buttons for browsing in Windows, but Linux, as noted, doesn't care much about them. The mouse wheel acts as expected. This default configuration leaves the right click in an awkward position where users can't hit both right and left clicks at the same time. I'm not sure who thought this up, but it makes zero sense to me from a usability standpoint.

So my first configuration change is to move the right-click functionality to the ring finger button, freeing up the little thumb button for something else in the process. The tool of choice for this task is xmodmap, whose particular usage for this piece is generally covered here, though not for this exact application. Go check it out. Before working with xmodmap, though, this page mentioned taking a little visit to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to ensure that the right driver's being used. On the Trackball Explorer, I have to have the Protocol line under the mouse configuration set to "ExplorerPS/2" or the system only sees 5 buttons. I spent many moons wrestling with duplicate mouse button functions before spotting this gem. Ensure that the number of buttons is set to 9 and ZAxisMapping is "4 5" for the Trackball Explorer. Make any changes needed, then restart X (I just restarted my system to be sure). Again, these settings are specific to the Trackball Explorer. Trial and error or Google searches should net settings for other devices.

Now xmodmap can reconfigure the buttons. Install xmodmap via whatever means you have available and set it up to start with your X session. The whole command line should be "xmodmap .xmodmaprc" so it loads its configuration file from your home directory. I built my .xmodmaprc file as follows:
pointer = 1 2 8 4 5 6 7 3 9

This switches pointer buttons 3 and 8 to move the right-click functionality to the ring finger button and set the little thumb button to do nothing. Run "xmodmap .xmodmaprc" from your home directory to remap the pointer buttons, and test by seeing if the ring finger button acts as a right-click in various applications. The little thumb button shouldn't do anything when clicked.

This is fine and dandy, resolving a major complaint I have with the way this device is set up by default, but at this point the little thumb and pinky buttons aren't configured to do anything. I like to set them to copy and paste in Windows, so I went about setting them to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V respectively in Linux since most applications "know" those key combinations as copy and paste. btnx has this power, and while there are some other solutions out there that might have the same capability, they require some serious research and kludgery to get working. btnx is rather elegant for this purpose.

Get and install btnx and btnx-config from this page and run btnx-config. Detect your pointing device and buttons as in the btnx-config instructions. Enable and set the little thumb button to KEY_C with a modifier of KEY_LEFTCTRL. Enable and set the pinky button to KEY_V with modifier KEY_LEFTCTRL. Don't enable any other buttons, because btnx doesn't need to mess with them. Restart btnx from the btnx-config Configurations screen and test.

Bada boom, bada bing. If you want to use those two buttons for something besides copy and paste, btnx is amazingly configurable, allowing for all kinds of variations. Like I said before, it's a must-have for mouse configuration.

As a side note, some of you might ask why I don't use two buttons set for forward and backward browsing on the mouse. Well, I actually have that functionality in Firefox after installing the All-in-One Gestures add-on. The add-on mimics Opera's built-in mouse gestures fairly well, including the forward and backward controls. Try it out, you might like the ability to browse backward by doing a right-click-and-hold then a left-click as much as I do. With this workaround available for Firefox, I decided to make copying and pasting just a mouse click away each to further reduce moving my hand away from my pointing device. Ergonomically sound, no?

Of course, after I post my thoughts on the Kindle based on my reading, Ars Technica posts an excellent overview of the beast. I still like my iLiad more thanks to its flexibility, but this article's brought the Kindle up a few notches in my opinion. I'm going to play later today with hooking up a USB keyboard to my iLiad and getting minimo to work on it just 'cuz I can...

Wow, what a hefty few weeks. As some of you may already know, one of my stepdaughters died on November 10th. The funeral was last week in Oregon, and there's another memorial here in San Diego coming up on the 8th. After the wildfires at the end of October and my multiple-hernia repair surgery, this last month has been a most memorable bunch of crazy time.

While handling the madness, I finished up Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South. Turtledove's research is excellent, and the novel feels more authentic for it. The plot is a good one, with a few threads that follow a fairly straightforward trail and others that are quite surprising. The first quarter of the book starts to grind a bit, looking like the introduction to a long series of grinding battle depictions, but then the war ends and the much more interesting aftermath begins. Guns of the South is an excellent presentation of real US Civil War information couched in science fiction. I learned quite a bit and enjoyed the trip considerably. Anyone interested in US history or alternate history novels will probably like this book.

Speaking of reading, my iLiad has been indispensible in the last few weeks, always handy with reading material or potential for geeking around. I'm considering starting to use the thing for note-taking at work, too. Not that I take a lot of notes, but when I go to meetings, I can save bringing a notepad. Really I only have one gripe about the iLiad: it still takes too long to start up. Hopefully startup time gets reduced in upcoming firmware releases.

Much hype is being made about another ereader that's just been released: Amazon's Kindle ereader. As an ereader owner/fan, I just have to weigh in. I think my wife put it best when I was describing the Kindle to her: "So you can get on the Internet anywhere you have cell coverage so that you can buy books from Amazon.com? That doesn't seem terribly useful." It's butt-ugly, too, with its keypad taking up a huge chunk of potential screen real estate. The idea with an ereader is to read displayed information, not to type, so chewing up screen space is an awful usability tradeoff. This is assuming, of course, that the Kindle's not able to chat or run word processing software. If it can do those things, maybe a keyboard's useful on it, but I don't see either of those tasks available on the Kindle, making the keyboard a serious waste of space. Give me a virtual keyboard on a bigger screen, I can still type with it. Or have an external USB port like the iLiad so you can run a bit of software and plug in a USB keyboard.

My biggest complaint with the Kindle is that it appears to be unable to simply read documents. You can email documents to the Kindle, but Amazon.com charges for converting the documents to a Kindle format for you. This locks out the ability to grab some of the excellent free text on the Web and read it on your Kindle. If I'd paid $400 for one of these things, I sure wouldn't want to pay more to read a free classic novel from Project Gutenberg or one of the other free book sites, thanks.

Even though it's being bagged by ereading groups and many techies, the Kindle brings much more interest to ereading, and that's a very good thing. One thing that it gets very right is its EVDO Internet connectivity. My iLiad can do Wi-Fi, but the no-usage-payment EVDO connectivity on the Kindle sounds like it'll be extremely nice. The free connectivity appears to have a price, though, in book costs and potential document conversion costs. Even though I think it's crippled most heinously, the Kindle could be just right for some folks. Anyone have any real world Kindle usage to relate?

In even more nerdy news, I've started running BOINC and have attached myself to the ABC@Home project. I read about the project on my favorite nerd news site, Ars Technica, and decided to switch from distributed.net to it. I'm part of Team Ars Technica, of course, user name Powdertoast if anyone wants to see how I'm doing.

I like distributed computing when a client is able to run 50-75% of full CPU power so there's not nearly as much impact to a system's temperature as running 100% full blast, and the BOINC client allows for this kind of configuration and more. Check out the BOINC client if you have an extra system laying around or you just want to do something good for mankind with some of your system's extra CPU cycles. There are plenty of interesting projects including SETI@Home running on BOINC.

I've been watching various gift lists as the end-of-year holidays, and it seems like they show 2007 as the year of usable small computing devices, but I'll talk more about that another time. Nerd up, yo.

With a bit of wire snipping and reconnecting, I've managed to get the 12- to 10-volt adapter and the Evercool fan into the NS4300N much more effectively, blocking MUCH less airflow and so far, appearing to work so good. Noise is reduced tremendously, to the point where the drives are what I hear rather than fan noise, though there is a small power supply fan that is barely audible. Temperatures seem to be hovering in the low 40C range, most spiffily chilly for a piece of electronica. If you have the means, I highly recommend doing this.

In other news, I'm still enjoying Great Expectations, coming up to the 1/4 way through mark. Seems like Pip's a fairly miserable young man so far, with plenty of interesting experiences, but still quite unhappy overall. I'm looking forward to a change, if one comes, and some tying together of what appear to be fairly disparate pieces of the tale. I find myself wondering why this is a classic. Maybe I'm looking too hard :(

I was one of the more than half a million people evacuated due to the wildfires in San Diego County earlier this week. In my particular case, we had to evacuate twice. My wife and I and our animals are finally all back home as of last night, all in one piece apiece. I was back home the night before and both of us went to our respective workplaces yesterday. My heart goes out to those people who have lost their homes, and my profound thanks go to all of the people helping take care of everyone (two- and four-legged) displaced by the fires. I hope the situation in Ramona improves without violence.

Anyway, my NAS tinkering stuff finished arriving yesterday, so I went at it, putting in a quieter 80mm x 15mm fan and a 12- to 10-volt converter to slow the fan down. I ended up with a bunch more cord to deal with that is reducing the airflow, but the thing is much quieter. I'm not real happy with the unit's temperature, though, after doing a bit of testing, so I've done a bit of cable repositioning and am still testing. If I have to yank the converter, which is also the source of most of the extra cabling and thus airflow reduction, I think I'll still be happy with the quieter fan. Temperatures in the unit crept up to 52C before I shut it down the other day and repositioned the cabling. Normal operating temp is 58C or less, so I wasn't real close to overheating it, but I wasn't loading it down at the time, just playing some tunes off of it. Under load, I could see imminent meltdown approaching.

In the current configuration I just told the unit to set aside 80 gigs on the drives for snapshot backups, which means one drive is working its tiny heart out, and the temp seems pretty stable at 49C. I'll check back on it later today after the ambient room temp goes up some more.

Parts? I got an Evercool EC8015M12CA fan and an Akasa Noise/Speed Reduction Cable 12V -> 10V 3-pin from Directron.com. Still iffy on the cable, but it's a possibility.

There are some tricks needed to get the connectors redone, and if I have a winning setup I'll probably get out a hot glue gun to solidify things instead of the temporary mess I have in there now, but it's not that bad.

Whoops, temp just went up to 50C in the unit. I'll check back on it in a bit. But that means most likely I'll just stick with the fan.

I upgraded both my laptop and my desktop to Gutsy Gibbon through the Update Manager. Total install times were basically overnight for each unit, and the process was surprisingly painless on my desktop. Not so much on the laptop thanks to its video, but I've worked around that. So far, I'm impressed with the update. Not a lot of big changes, mostly just some smaller stuff, more speed, more prettinesses. But it feels mo' better, more smooth and steady. And printing is very nicely updated. I haven't checked printing from Wine, let's see... Well lookee there, a fairly complex document's printed perfectly without extra configuration. I think I'm gonna weep for joy.

I won't go into a decent review, there are plenty of other ones already out there. But if you're running Feisty, check Gutsy out. It's better in just about every way.

Except for one way: The issue on my laptop is that the ATi video isn't decently supported. In fact, looking at ATi's web site, I don't see a Linux driver for anything that resembles the video processor. Kind of fun. Under Feisty, I was using an ATi driver that I'd installed through EasyUbuntu. Now I just have a VESA driver installed that seems fast enough, just doesn't have 3D support. I don't play much on the laptop, so no biggie for now. I've seen that others have the same general issue with some ATi drivers, so being nothing remotely close to a driver programmer I'll just wait for a while to see what comes up.

In other news, my bunch of bits for tampering with tamper-resistant screws arrived, so I took the back of my new NAS off. Looks like a low-height 80mm fan on the back with a standard 3-prong power plug that should be easy as pie to replace with a variable speed or at least just quieter fan. I'll do some shopping later tonight.

All you Ubuntu zombies out there, Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu's 7.10 release, has been finally unleashed upon the world! I'm downloading the amd64 desktop torrent right now, though I'm still debating waiting on the installation.

Big updates include flashy desktop effects, printer installation goodness, and evidently some Firefox goodness in the form of Ubuntu-specific plugin management. There's gotta be some more under the hood for me to upgrade, but I have that technophile bug. My current Feisty Fawn install's running oh so well, though. Anyone do an upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy yet?

Wait, I have a laptop that's pretty much a crash and burn unit. MUA HAAAA! More details later after the upgrade completes on it... hee. Cool note: The Update Manager has an "Upgrade Tool" available in it, so I may not have to deal with a cold iso install. Again Ubuntu beats the shiznit out of the big OS's in customer ease of use... Hmm, the Ubuntu web site appears to be getting completely hammered right now. Might wait a few more days to download the update tool. The amd64 iso torrent's coming in strong, but the laptop's not an amd64.

In other news, my migration from the NAS Lite file server to the new Promise NS4300N is complete. It's awesome to just have a couple of systems to migrate over, I must say. I'm still stoked with the little thing, aside from the noise factor. I've ordered a set of tamper-resistant star ratchet bits so I can open the tamper-resistant star screws on the unit and tamper with the fan. While I applaud Promise's use of what seems to be a good airflow configuration, please PLEASE give us bozos who spent money on equipment the option of throttling the fan down or better yet the ability to set the unit into a smart cooling mode where low heat slows the fan down and high heat speeds it up.

And Great Expectations is enjoyful. I'm four chapters in and still trying to get a good feel for Pip's character, but the similarities between he and Huckleberry Finn are already intriguing. Dickens does some good dark humor, 'e does.

I picked up a Promise NS4300N NAS yesterday and a couple of 500GB Seagate SATA drives. Thank you, Fry's, for being my most-of-the-time one-stop comp-mecca. The NAS setup was easy-peasy on the hardware side, but starting the thing up revealed my least favorite part of this device. The fan's noisy as fuck-all compared to all my other computer equipment. I will resolve this shortly in my own special way (most likely changing the fan and some sound damping in the case), and have kicked myself for not reading the box more closely before the purchase to note that the words "quiet" and "noise reduction" don't appear. I must have mixed this unit up with another one while I was researching online. The noise is the only thing about the hardware that I can give a negative to. The drive trays went on easily, the drives slide in and out of the unit smoothly with definite feedback when you've pushed them into the unit far enough, and I just had to plug in power and a network cable. Very nice.

Feeling smug after the hardware install went well, the initial software setup had the small hiccup of requiring a boot into Windoze to get the Windows-based configuration utility to find the NAS box so I could set a static IP address. After that very slight irritation, administration's all done by pointing a browser at the IP address. Could I have tried to get to the NAS through Linux by checking DHCP addresses off my firewall/router and pointing my browser at it? Yeah, but I wanted to play by the manufacturer's rules.

The web-based admin interface is fairly straightforward with some exceptions. I told the box to set up a RAID 1 (mirroring) between the two drives and it gave me access to the volume while it completed its mirroring online. Nice touch to allow access during the RAID initialization. Next, I started looking more closely at the shares and security. Shares are simple to build, you just create a directory, but instead of having the protocols and access rights administration for the shares on one page, they're on separate screens, so admins end up bouncing around a bit to get everything set up. Not a big deal, just a little odd. For each share, there's user and group access to set up, giving quite a bit of flexibility. Once the user name, password, and mappings are set up, the NS4300N seems to have robust Windows security support. The NS4300N's NFS configuration requires entering the IP address of any systems that are going to access NFS shares on the NAS. I didn't see a way to use a subnet for this, so a network configuration where DHCP is used for systems that are going to access the NS4300N through NFS are going to have a rough time. As far as I can tell, every potential IP address that might access the NAS has to be entered into the dialog one at a time, or they can't reach any NFS shares on the NS4300N. For my configuration this isn't a problem, since most of my *ix systems have static IP addresses already. I added the first few potential DHCP addresses to the list just to be on the safe side, though.

Group configuration is easy in the NS4300N. Groups are listed with a leading @ along with all the regular user names in the share user access control screen. This leaves the potential for setting a group's access to X while a specific user's access can be set to Y. Most likely the user rights will take precedence over the group rights, but this isn't clear, though I haven't dug deeply into the docs for the latest firmware release to see if it has the goods on that. I could test or dig more, but I must again say that I've succumbed to laziness. My setup's not going to use groups since I have a whole two regular users.

Some other small notes worth mentioning include gigabit ethernet, firmware upgrading is fairly simple (the unit shipped with the initial firmware instead of the 9/12/07 firmware), hot swappable drives, and RAID volumes are fully accessible while volumes are created or migrated from one RAID level to another.

That's about it. It's a simple setup, the unit has good functionality, there are some issues to overcome in the admin interface for larger installations, and it's a noisy little critter if that matters to you. Bada boom, I have a new file server in a very short time. I'd encourage anyone interested in the unit to head over to Promise's web site and download the latest manual for more details.

Aight, gangstas, I've been spending much of my not-working time readin' shit on my iLiad, yo. I'm not sure why I wanted to start this fresh in in yo' face. Just don't ask. But my iLiad saga continues! I've been reading a bunch of gaming literature, including items that are formatted with big ol' pages. The type on these large size books, as I mentioned in a comment earlier, is small on the iLiad's screen, but definitely readable. If the type isn't formatted in multiple columns on the page, I blow it up and read about a half a page at a time with the bigger type. Even with columns using the stylus to move the viewing area around on a page to read it all in order is becoming second nature to me.

Small remaining gripes like bookmarks in PDFs and ability to change the default text file font are being worked on, there's a lot of stuff out on the Internet to pull down onto the thing, and FeedBooks gets a shout out for working on an iLiad app that will bring down RSS feeds live from the IntarWeb. They're working with an iLiad enthusiast to get their existing app running and evidently it's going well. I should probably check on that.

I've had a hankerin' to get my NAS file server to have more data redundancy, less noise, and less power usage. While I love NAS Lite and have had it working stably for quite some time, I think I'm ready to snap up a dedicated NAS box, and Promise appears to have an offering that's looking like it's going to be the one. I'll document as I move along in the process.

I've been playing with my new iRex iLiad some more and have decided that I love it.

Physically, it's excellent for using as a reading device. The screen resolution, e-ink display, and size of the display area are great. It has very good controls for managing text/document display sizes, and it's easy to get used to as far as document navigation, which leads to existing and future functionality.

Right now, the iLiad is mighty usable, but users can extend that functionality, and iRex is building more into the firmware as well. The iLiad is a Linux-based device, and users can get to the command line through a "patch" that can be downloaded from iRex's web site. Once you have a command line, the virtual world is your oyster. iRex also makes a VMWare image of the iRex available for developers to work with in order to ease development. There are already a few applications that have been ported to the iRex such as improved PDF reading, a Web browser, and other fun, making the iRex into a sort of tablet PC device. It's not going to play action games thanks to the low refresh rate, but I can see someone porting Nethack to it. I think there's already some Solitaire action going on. iRex is also adding further functionality to the existing suite, making the iLiad usable in more environments and with more types of documents. This isn't the kind of situation where you get a tech toy that's never going to change, there have already been some significant feature additions and improvements, and it's only going to get better in the future.

Back to usability: I like how the iLiad feels in my hand enough that I started focusing on content rather than the fact that I'm reading on a flat panel within a few minutes. The thing just works well for me, though I have to admit that I seem to get used to new ways of interacting with physical objects fairly quickly. I like that I don't have to apply pressure to the unread side of a book to keep it flat. There's no shifting back and forth from one side of the book to the other as I finish a page. Going to the next page on the iLiad is almost the same as flipping a page in a book because iRex built a "flip bar" into the left side of the device. Reading on the iLiad is conveniently do-able instead of being alien, and I'm all about comfort and usability in technology these days.

I've read through several roleplaying PDFs and have gotten more out of these sessions than I recall getting out of reading them on my PC. Maybe it's that working with the iLiad feels more natural, maybe it's the fact that I can curl up with the thing on my comfy sofa instead of sitting in my computer chair.

Is it worth over $700 to get an iLiad? Almost definitely not for everyone. But we vote with our money, and I think that iRex is headed in exactly the right direction. Do I want to remove books? Hell no, but I have enough of the things taking up space in my room already. If I read a few hundred novels on the iLiad instead of buying the books, I break even. Browsing through Project Gutenberg and other free e-book locations on the Web over the last few years has left me with well over that number of etexts. I've also been getting cheaper PDF versions of roleplaying games for the past few years instead of books, probably saving a couple of hundred dollars just in those purchases alone. The iLiad's already paid for itself in my somewhat abnormal case.

In short, I'm diggin' my iRex iLiad. And I'm calling it a very early Christmas present to offset the cost. Heheh.

Someone please come up with a better scanning interface than XSane or figure out how the hell I can get an ICM (color management file) for my HP 3500c. The version of XSane that's currently in Feisty doesn't have a configuration for scanners, only negatives and slides. WTF?

I can't manipulate the colors on an XSane preview in realtime and can't seem to figure out what color settings to use to get a decent scan out of it. I can get a grayscale scan just fine, but color management and the trial and error involved are killing me off.

If I really need a scan, I drop into Windows XP and resulting in a great scan in a couple of minutes. It Just Works. This is the only reason I still need Windows on here except for games. I hate that.

I've tried the Gimp plugin and because the output from XSane is so far off, the Gimp doesn't get enough to work with to get a good result. I've tried QuiteInsane, which errors out when I try to preview or scan, though it finds the scanner.

GRUH!

Oh, and the new Harry Potter book is the best of the series. I'm still fairly speechless about it. Rowling has blown her imitators out of the water, 'cept for the somewhat unnecessary but still kind of charming epilogue. I don't know where my HP book 6 is, which bugs me greatly. I felt like that book was spent mostly setting up book 7, and yet Deathly Hallows brings not only Half-Blood Prince's loose ends to a satisfying conclusion, but also a huge number of issues from previous books in the series. It's unbelievable. But I wanted to reread Half-Blood Prince again. I'll find it. In the meantime, I hereby present a virtual one-person standing ovation to J.K. Rowling for the entire Harry Potter series!

So I switched my main system mouse back to my beloved Microsoft Trackball Explorer and remapped a coupla buttons. Mmm, button mapping. The major reason I went with a Logitech mouse months ago was that the Windows driver (yes, Microsoft's) kinda sucks. Lost button mappings and occasional tracking twitchiness were my symptoms, and I verified the driver's culpability by hooking up the Trackball Explorer in Linux for a while. The cordless Logitech trackball was good, with plenty of buttons, but it's not as ergonomically comfy as the Trackball Explorer. Since I'm using Ubuntu primarily now, Microsoft's crappy Trackball Explorer driver doesn't matter, so there ya go.

I finished up Line by Line and found it thoroughly helpful with getting myself through those weird sticky grammar questions that I occasionally get myself into while writing. I highly recommend it for anyone doing any serious literary authoring.

I'm rereading my favorite book in the world, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and for whatever reason, I'm picking up more details out of it and enjoying the ride a bit more. The cohesion is mo' better. If you haven't read Snow Crash, it's a cyberpunk lite book with a serious philosophical history angle reminiscent of the premises of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. There's a lot of humor also, which is a difference with "standard" gritty cyberpunk noir, but it's not contrived or just funny for funny's sake, though there are exceptions. For example, the book begins by documenting Hiroaki Protagonist's last job as The Deliverator, a pizza courier for the Mafia. Yes, that name shortens to "Hiro Protagonist". It's a really fun read, and very much a thought-provoker at the same time. Gimme dat.

I was going through some of my old directories the other day and stumbled on my huge stash of electronic books, mainly stuff from Project Gutenberg, and felt the tug to get some kind of electronic reader again. I'll have to do some more research to see what's out there now.

The ever-interesting Zolved has an article up about speeding up OpenOffice.org's start time. The article's tips worked unbelievably well for me.

This leads me to something interesting I've noticed with Feisty Fawn. It boots up faster than XP, and I have a bit of extra junk installed now, though still nothing like what I had in Windoze. I've done a couple of speed tweaks, though, including having grub load as a shell, lowering vm.swappiness in sysctl.conf, and installing profile. Still, doing what I could in XP just didn't stick like it has in Feisty.

Meanwhile, back to OpenOffice.org, and other word processors. There's a big ol' word processor review at DonationCoder.com covering all three major WP toys and a bunch of smaller ones. My beloved OOo fared extremely well, especially as the bestest academic word processor. I have an MLA template for OOo that's done me proud for several semesters of English essays, allowing me to focus on generating content without wrestling with formatting. I just started to touch OOo's bibliography database, one of the review's pluses for OOo, while writing my final essay for my last English class. I'll be using it much more in the future. Ees nice.

And whipping back to Ubuntu, I found out how to get Feisty Fawn to allow me to rotate my monitor. Just add a RandRRotation "On" line to the monitor definition in xorg.conf and Ubuntu's Screen Resolution app allow rotation. This is terribly exciting for large scale word processing and reading long stuff in general. Well, not that exciting, I guess, but since my monitor can rotate, it's great that it's supported in my OS. And when I'm working on a big project, I do love to rotate the screen so I can see whole pages at once. Really. It makes the word-wrestling go much more smoothly for some reason. I like reading PDFs that way, too.

Which reminds me, when I have some extra cash, which at this rate may be quite some time, I still need to get a digital reader thingie.

Anyone going to waste money on an iPhone on the 29th?

The Windows "upgrade" of Feisty Fawn involves repartitioning the hard drive into Linux and Windows sections, an expected effect, but it's fairly seamless, giving a few options for the partitioning and then acting on its own from there. Once installed, Feisty Fawn offers XP booting on the boot menu, though it defaults, of course, to starting up Ubuntu. The first time I went into XP after the repartitioning, a file system check was forced, along with another reboot, then XP booted fine. XP doesn't see the Linux partition, something I expected, though Feisty sees all if you work at it. There is a bit of finagling required to get to the Windows section of the hard drive from Ubuntu, but I think that's a good thing. Additional data security/separation is provided by the Windows partition being mounted in read-only by default under Feisty. I just copied a few things over to the Linux partition and am considering reducing the size of the Windows partition even further.

I liked Wine a lot before running Feisty Fawn, but Wine has been even better integrated into the main desktop in Feisty. Wine installation puts a couple of administration apps onto Ubuntu's System/Administration folder, which is nice. Wine runs just about every Windows app I've thrown at it, and if it hasn't, well, it's typically my fault for trying something weird. I decided to try running foobar2000, my favorite Windows music player, directly from the XP partition through Wine to see what happened. My jaw dropped: it worked without any odd behavior. Foobar 2000 didn't see the network drive for my main music repository, since it's not "mounted" as something that Wine would see, but after I copied an OGG file from the network drive to the desktop, foobar 2000 could see it and played it. I was expecting that foobar 2000 would fit into that "weird" category of applications for some reason. I was also expecting that Wine would have trouble finding any extra DLLs or anything that foobar 2000 needed because the application wasn't installed in the Linux partition. Not so. Well done, Wine devs, well done! I'm looking forward to trying some other apps out as well.

My USB sound works great, I just plug it in, switch to the different hardware in the Sound setup, and restart any apps that are using sound. Bada boom, bada bing. When I want to disconnect it, I stop any apps using it, change the Sound setup back to normal, and disconnect the hardware again.

My mini USB hub appears to be working fine in Feisty also, handling not only swapping my USB trackball out of a main laptop USB port and into the USB hub port with no complaints or oddities, but also my Kinesis keyboard with its USB to PS/2 adapter. I haven't plugged in an external USB drive yet, though I expect that to work fine, too, if needed.

I'm using a workaround for printing. I can print directly to my HP LaserJet 1200 if I swap the printer's USB cable from my main system to the laptop. But I can also create a PDF of anything I want to print, send it to the network share, and print it from my main system if I want to. I don't feel the need to muck around with a print server just yet.

The last thing to tackle was the ever-troublesome wireless connectivity. ndiswrapper came into play on that, along with disabling a kernel driver. I had to jimmy with some other settings here and there, reboot a few times, resolve a small issue with the interface file in /etc, but wireless connectivity's now consistent here at the haus with Feisty Fawn. It was much much less hassle than the Dapper wireless setup, though perhaps some of that has to do with my increased familiarity with the morass of parts to get the whole thing running. It definitely helped considerably that Feisty has more of the pieces already in place by default to get wireless WPA working.

So there it is. All of the hardware that I need to have working on the laptop is now working, and I have workarounds for anything that isn't, such as scanning from my main system and transferring the results through the network to the laptop. The ability to run Windows apps fairly well through Wine even further reduces the need to keep running Windows. In short, this is a rockin' version of Ubuntu. I hear there's another one coming out later this year. I'll be there....

I decided that my main PC made too much noise and had too much dust in it, so I ordered a new CPU heatsink and dropped by Fry's to get some new, quieter fans. The goal was to improve cooling, decrease noise, and replace the existing dusty components of my cooling subsystem.

The heatsink I settled on after much Intarweb review reading was the Thermalright SI-128. This beast is so new that Thermalright's Web persons haven't put it up on their site yet. That hasn't stopped me before, but it did make me pause for a few moments before ordering the thing. I ordered it and decided to try going fanless on the CPU for funsies, knowing that I was going to get a fan later. The SI-128 is an interesting creature in a few ways. It's bloody huge and has been touted as an absolutely fabuloso heat exchanger. There are four heat pipes that lead to a very large array of thin metal strips with space for a 120mm fan on top for airflow.

Now if you know anything about fan sizes, a 120mm square is pretty damn big for a PC part. Picture a fan about the same size as a CD case. Yeah. Well, my awesome case has one of these sitting behind the CPU that pulls air out, and my awesome power supply has one inside as well to pull air through, with its intake vent just above the CPU. So I figured I had decent airflow to try a fanless CPU heatsink out between the two fans right next to the CPU and a duct leading from the side of the case to the CPU for additional outside airflow. The lure of a silent CPU fan was strong.

To make a long story short, the heatsink is kind of a pain in the butt to get installed, but I've worked with worse. It's just a cumbersome process. And the heatsink's tall. Very tall. So tall that the side intake duct in my case was nearly too long when completely compressed. But I got it all in there and stabilized and pulled internal power and data cables away from the new monstrosity via moderate application of tie wraps.

With the beast in place with no fan, I closed the box up and ran distributed.net's excellent distributed computing client. At idle, the CPU core held at about 34C, a very nice temperature. Under single core full load, the temperature held at about 44C. A bit high, but still ok. Under full dual core load, though, the temperature went up to 53C before I closed down the distributed.net client. Watching after that, the temperature dropped back down to 34C in under ten minutes. That means that the heat exchanging is unbelievable on the SI-128, something I'd read about in many places, and that there wasn't enough airflow to wick away the heat from the sink's vanes quickly enough under full load. My my my, it was quiet though. We're talking I could hear the normally inaudible hard drive working when I fired up Guild Wars. Realllly quiet.

Going fanless without running my system full bore was tempting, but I decided to be safe and put a 120mm fan on top. The fan on top of the heatsink made the case's side duct unworkable, so I pulled that off and covered the hole with a dust grate I had lying around.

I decided to just let fans run as they would and see what happened rather than taking advantage of the considerable CPU fan speed control options that my motherboard BIOS offers. I screwed the box back together. Now I could hear the 120mm fan on the heatsink, but it was still a good amount quieter than the old setup. The CPU fan plug must just be set to run the CPU fan a bit higher than it needs to, but that's not a big deal. I can change the low temperature fan speed manually if I want to. Time for more testing.

Since I knew that the heatsink alone would handle single core distributed.net processing fine, I busted out full dual load and watched for about ten minutes. The CPU temperature went up to 43C by the time I moved on. I brought up Guild Wars and had it sit at the somewhat graphically-intensive intro screen for another couple of hours to load the video as well. A steady 44C resulted. Very nice. And no perceptible increase in the still-quiet fan noise.

I closed everything and let Windows sit idle. CPU temperature dropped to 33C within three minutes. This is an amazing heatsink configuration for that kind of heat exchange to occur. So I pulled up Unreal Tournament 2004, configured it for maximum video detail, and left it running large botmatches overnight as a burnin. CPU temperature this morning was 38C. After shutting the game down, temperature dropped to 32C in under two minutes. I imagine that I could have hammered one of the CPU cores with distributed.net and run the test again and ended up with maybe 41C, but I'm satisfied.

Actually, I'm more than satisfied: I'm almost shocked at how well this thing works. It's a big heatsink, not at all good for mini PC configurations, but I've never had a better CPU heatsink/CPU fan on my rig, and nothing I've had before has been this quiet. If you're looking for a quiet and extremely effective air-based cooling solution for your PC CPU, this is it.

Exeunt.

Wow, there's an amazing anti-gadget whoring rant on Gizmodo by one of the site's former editors.

While this piece is a bit over the top, I'm on board. I like to read Gizmodo once in a while, but I totally bypass the shiny blingy phones, tablets, and other crap while looking for interesting design or the occasional other interesting item there.

That's all for now. Stay safe, the Intarweb has some nasty crap going around for Valentine's Day.

I finally got wireless working under Dapper Drake and am posting this via wireless from El Laptop-o sans wired connectivity.

The solution? Well, several steps were involved. I don't have the links handy, but they went something like this:

1. Get a better supported wireless card. In my case the Linksys WPC54G v3 worked out much better than my 54GS did. Turns out that this new card has a Broadcom 43xx based chipset, which led me to the rest of the solution.

2. Remove standard Broadcom 43xx support from the Ubuntu kernel via rmmod.

3. Install bcm43xx-fwcutter and pull/install the firmware/driver from the Windows driver CD for the wireless adapter for it.

4. Install the gnome network manager and disable support for Ubuntu's default network manager.

5. Install wpasupplicant and disable it so the gnome network manager can still use its components.

6. Unplug the regular network cable, plug in the wireless card.

7. Restart Ubuntu.

8. Pick the local network from those available (looks like my neighbors have 2 other ones around that I didn't know about), set up the WPA Personal information and go web surfin'.

So the gnome network manager, wpasupplicant, and bcm43xx-fwcutter were the necessary pieces, and configuring 'em was key as well.

No, I'm sorry, I'm not going to try to track all this down and post where I got the pieces and the command line information. I'm going to do something besides Linux networking for a while :)