I have some minor annoyances with Ubuntu Hardy Heron:

Installing the latest version of btnx, deleting all the buttons in it, and reconfiguring them has not resolved an issue I was having where Firefox 3 beta overrides btnx's configuration. FF3's override stays after FF3's closed, but restarting btnx resets the mouse buttons back to what I want them to be. If I don't use FF3 beta, the mouse buttons stay fine. One possible culprit is the FireGestures add-on for FF3. My favorite All-In-One Gestures isn't updated for FF3 yet, so I had to settle for FireGestures. I'm still looking into this.

Print driver. I was trying to see if XSane, a scanning engine for Linux, was usable, and decided to install a package of HP drivers. Lo and behold, my HP Laserjet 1200 printer was wroth at such action, and perforce decideth to lock up ye systemme when accessed. I've fixed this driver-related screwup and still hate XSane's insanity. So Windows is still where I go to scan images. Grr. I know, that's an XSane issue. But the printer driver shouldn't be updated unless I tell the damn thing to be updated, mmkay?

I guess this next one isn't really a Hardy issue, it's an XMMS issue. XMMS, the Linux Winamp, is not available under Hardy Heron. Imagine my delight when I found out that XMMS was replaced with XMMS2. 2 must be better than the first iteration, right? RIGHT!? Well, yes and no. Turns out that XMMS2 is a daemon that does a great job of playing music, but it expects user interaction through the command line rather than a GUI. This blows my mind a little. I mean, I understand that they're pulling away from coding graphics and just want to focus on the playback, but come on, why not have a superbasic GUI? Instead there are plenty of potential XMMS2 front ends that are in development, none of which has the ease of use of XMMS. *sigh* On the other hand, exaile, the Gnome version of amaroK, a decent iPod-aware program, is looking pretty stable, and it seems like the quiet playback issue has been resolved. So I'm using that now for music.

I have a cron job that runs hourly to mirror my current home directory structure to my file server via rsync. After I booted into Hardy, I tried to run the cron job manually to get a snapshot of any config files that had changed. Interestingly enough, hard drive access on my file server went berserk. Turns out that a directory called .gvfs in my home directory was pretty much a mirror of the entire hard drive. Yep, the cron job was trying to sync up the Gnome Virtual File System. The job crashed out with an error, fortunately, so I excluded that directory and all's good now. So that was fun. Running df at the command prompt, there's an entry called "gvfs-fuse-daemon" that's the same size as my hard drive. Again, the Gnome Virtual File System is the culprit. Having looked at a general overview of what the GVFS project is doing, I'm all for it, but 'tis a might bit funky at the moment.

Finally, and this may be an NVidia driver issue, there are some occasional visual glitches once in a while that resolve themselves, but a flash of discombobulated video isn't something I like in my desktop experience. Anyone else seeing this with a high end NVidia card?

Good things about Hardy far outweigh the negatives. It's much more responsive overall, and seems to run my CPU cooler for some reason under the same load. Boot time is very snappy. Google Notebook and del.icio.us seem to have embraced Firefox 3 beta with mostly-functional updates, which, aside from my mouse button woes, were my big beefs with Firefox 3 beta. It's good. Just more troublesome than my Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon upgrade.

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 got my iPod Touch syncing through Ubuntu Gutsy via gtkpod! It's not a full solution, because gtkpod doesn't handle some of my files correctly, possibly due to directory depths on my file server, so I have to look into that further, but gtkpod will convert my Ogg Vorbis files to mp3 format and send 'em to the iPod Touch. The full solution was, frankly, laborious. I'll go over all of the general steps, though, and let people hunt down the details because I sure as hell can't find them now.

• Ensure Wi-Fi is working at home for the iPod Touch.
  
• Set the iPod Touch to not autolock. Very important step while working with the Wi-Fi, avoiding many connectivity issues.
  
• Jailbreak the iPod Touch. I ended up leaving mine at 1.1.1 firmware release thanks to issues with the 1.1.2 jailbreaking.
  
• Install the BSD subsystem and OpenSSH onto the iPod Touch through the newly-available Installer.
  
• Set up OpenSSH on my Ubuntu system.
  
• Set up SSH access to the iPod Touch.
  
• Use ipod-convenience to set up a mount point of /media/ipod on my Ubuntu system and test it.
  
• Install the latest and greatest gtkpod. Configure it to point to my music library and the iPod Touch. Manually get gtkpod to add library subdirectories because it doesn't seem to go down more than a couple of directory levels. Test synchronizing a non-mp3 to the iPod Touch. Adjust as needed and retest. Repeat until it's working.

iTunes is still useful in case I totally blow out the iPod Touch or I feel a deep sense of urgency to upgrade the firmware. At this point I haven't got either of those issues, but I am interested in some of the podcasts I can get through there. I might rent movies through iTunes, too, I dunno. If I do, it'll be to watch 'em on my computer rather than the iPod Touch. I don't get why someone would want to watch a full length movie on such a tiny screen.

Anyway, this means my iPod Touch is now officially a useful toy for me rather than just interesting to dink around with. Thanks to all of the hackers and developers who are opening up the iPod Touch under Linux. I'm hunting for online tip jars for you people...

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.

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.

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?

I now have my NAS-Lite 2 server exporting an NFS share that my main desktop's mounting at startup, which means that my music library is available to Windows apps running under Wine, which means that I now have foobar 2000 cranking out 4-speaker audio. Ahhhhhh yessss.

Automatix allowed me to get DTS sound working for DVDs playing in MPlayer.

I got Flash Player working under 64-bit Firefox. That was interesting, but searching around on the Intarweb got that issue resolved.

Nearly at the other end of the spectrum for painful conversions from Windows to Linux, my Windows Thunderbird repository has been ported over to Ubuntu. It was just a matter of copying the profile folder over to the right directory in Ubuntu and then editing the .ini file. Bada boom bada bing. I chose to stick with Thunderbird because I'm going to tackle getting Time & Chaos 6 working under Ubuntu some more soon, so I didn't need the calendar stuff.

Scanning is still troublesome with XSane, so I'm going to hit Le Web further on that later.

I have my NTFS partition now mounted up read-write and have moved my documents over from Windows to Ubuntu. My external hard drive has a backup of my current Linux configuration already. By the way, being able to just back up my home directory and get everything of mine rather than having to track stuff down all over the drive (Documents and Settings, Program Files, etc.) is awesome.

I'm just about done porting things over, and right now am having an easy time staying in Ubuntu without having to go into Windows. Gotta try out some games sometime, though I don't expect much success ... heheh.

I'll post about The Bluest Eye later. What a sad, beautiful story.

I went ahead and installed the 64-bit version of Ubuntu onto my main system, setting the whole shebang up as a dual boot configuration. So far, so good. It's fast. Hella fast. And after configuring a few things to my liking, I think I like the Ubuntu configuration more than my old XP one.

I still have to get Ubuntu to mount the Windows partition automatically on bootup as read-write, work on getting the Linux version of Thunderbird to interact with my Windows Thunderbird mail repository, and I'm going to lose, at least temporarily, the use of one of my favorite apps, Time & Chaos, due to incompatibility with Wine. T&C is especially heartbreaking because it's been my personal info manager of choice for years. So I'll mention it to the Wine devs and see what they can do.

There are a few other things like getting my pointing device's buttons to do middle clicks and double clicks like I have it in Windows, but I'll get to them when I get to them.

Overall, it's definitely a better package. I'm diggin' it.

I finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, liked it very much, and am now reading Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye, which is just astounding. Reviews of both to follow in a few days. Today I'm getting married!

I worked out something on Feisty Fawn that I should have thought of earlier.... When Firestarter, a nice, simple, graphical firewall for Linux, is in use, it tends to block some DHCP activity that is mighty helpful in connecting to a wireless network. So I allow DHCP traffic through Firestarter and the connection issues I'd had with initial connection to the haus network have gone from being somewhat minor to vanishing completely. Aw yeah.

I also decided that it would be fun to have the laptop on my desk next to my main system's screen. In preparation for this, I hunted around for something that would allow for seamless Windows/Unix remote control over TCP-IP. I'd seen such a critter a while ago, but couldn't remember what it was. Well, I settled on a free, difficult to configure, yet very nice when set up application called Synergy.

Synergy's free and Lifehacker has a short tutorial on it that helped me out. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has two packages available: synergy, the base application, and quicksynergy, a GUI interface for the base synergy package. I pulled those down and installed them. quicksynergy is actually much easier to use than the Windows interface for Synergy, somewhat amusingly, but it's not as flexible as the Windows menus for more complex configurations.

I set up my Windows box as the server, and after a bit of juggling had the network traffic between the two systems flowing but locked down in both firewalls so that I can run the laptop as if it were another monitor attached to the right side of my Windows system. Now I can do away with having to use separate keyboard and mouse for the laptop, and if I want to, say, research on the laptop while composing in Windows, I can.

Ees nice.

Ubuntu 7.04, aka Feisty Fawn, has been released! I downloaded the 32-bit ISO and checked out the live version on my main system last night.

My system:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
nForce 4-based motherboard with gigabit ethernet enabled
2 gigs of RAM
NVidia 6800 GS-based video card w/256 megs
48x DVD-ROM
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2
HP Scanjet 3500c (USB)
HP Laserjet 1200 (USB)

32-bit version on a 64-bit AMD system? Well, I'm going to install it onto my laptop later, which is a 32-bit Intel CPU. I may try the 64-bit version of Feisty Fawn on the main system after the laptop checks out and go with a dual boot so I have my games, too. Much later, though, enough that I'm pretty sure there'll be more stable releases.

Anyway, on to my first impressions from the live CD. I'll start by saying my hardware all worked well right away with very few exceptions. XSane didn't play well with my scanner. Now, XSane did detect my scanner nearly correctly, saying that it found a Scanjet 3500, but the quality of the scans were awful. I couldn't figure out where to set basic things like resolution and such in the application, so I just left it. I'm pretty sure that I could resolve that issue with some tweaking in the program, but I barely use the scanner as is, so this wasn't a big deal. The other thing that was a little frustrating was that I couldn't find anyplace to change the bass/treble sound output levels. Sound output was very tinny compared to what I'm used to with my 5.1 speaker setup, and since I didn't mess with the settings on the speakers, it had to be something with the sound support in Ubuntu. Gotta have the raucous music playing in the background, dontchaknow.

Both of my pointing devices worked fine, and I didn't play with my Nostromo n52, but I imagine that Feisty Fawn would treat it as a keypad with some mouse controls. It's a game thing, not needed for Linux. My printer was detected right away when I asked Feisty Fawn to look for a new printer, so I pulled up a PDF and printed a page out. Flawless victory. I was able to play OGG and MP3 files after installing the correct codecs from within the included player. Rather than having to go through the package manager or EasyUbuntu to get the codecs, the player just went out and nabbed them for me. Very nice. Firefox and OpenOffice.org were speedy once they came up (remember, on a live CD, the OS is all loading from the CD into memory, so initial load times are longer than from a hard drive).

I was able to access my Samba-based network file server from inside of almost all applications, and in other ones I just had to create a connection to it on the desktop and these applications treated it like another file system. Awesome.

While I wasn't able to test wireless out to see about WPA support, a quick jaunt over to the Ubuntu site nabbed me details about setting that up rather than working with WEP. WPA appears to be supported as a fairly mainstream option now instead of the roundabout hackery I had to perform with Dapper Drake.

In short, with the addition of Thunderbird to the mix and some usage of Wine for Windows stuff, it looks like I'd have everything I need from a non-game standpoint in a Feisty Fawn install, and it also appears to be a slightly faster, more stable release than Dapper Drake. So I'll be installing the Fawn onto my laptop soon, testing out the "Windows upgrade" installation as I do so. I'll report more after that.

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 :)

Five ways to use Windows apps in Linux covers everything from switching to an open source alternative software to running apps on a remote Windows box. It's timely information considering the slow swell of people who are considering running Linux vs. Vista.

Me? I'm still fiddling with Ubuntu, but have things pretty much worked out on it to the point where I think I can do everything I want to on it besides connect securely to the wireless segment of my home network. One of my to-do tasks for today is to find a wireless PC card that does 54g and has WPA compatibility in Ubuntu for my laptop.

Some of you might recall that I was trying to get an outliner working under Ubuntu a while back. I've resolved the issue by trying out KeyNote, a free Windows outliner app that has a very big following. I fell in love with it and guess what? Yes, it runs very nicely under Wine, with one issue: coloring the background of text doesn't work correctly, but I don't desperately need text highlighting other than changing the foreground text coloration anyway.

KeyNote's also replaced ADM as my outliner of choice in general, but I still need something to collect web data with, so I'll be looking at NetSnippets and other such toys later. Meanwhile, copy and paste works just fine.

Meanwhile, back to Vista backlash and looking at Linux as a main OS. The sentiment seems pretty rampant among the geek "priesthood". I think we all know that having to learn Vista's inevitable for those of us who support others' computers, but the timing is perfect for desktop Linux usage to really take off. This could be the year.

Happy Holidays, folks, hope you're all well and having a decent end-of-year time.

Me? I have a cold and the resulting semi-grumps, but I have had a great few days despite that. Among my gifties was a book called Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks that seems wrong for me from the title (I'm definitely a geek), but the book has a TON of excellent information about using Ubuntu as a regular schmoe. Topics covered include where to install fonts, how to get multimedia working smoothly, and these are covered in enough detail to get through each "project" without being too simplistic or requiring too much command line work. Not only is it a great gathering of highly useful information, it's extremely well written, too.

Here's an interesting look at Microsoft's security for its remote users. Microsoft is a massive target for hackers, yet they manage to keep things secure. The article gives details on how MS does it, in the process giving good information for paranoid admins to consider in securing their networks.

I had no idea there were more than a smattering of fairly functional "WebOS" configurations out there, much less that some of them are fairly usable. frantic industries has reviewed two handfuls. My big concern is that in order to get to these things, you have to have a decent Web browser implementation. Depending on the underlying Web tech, you may have to have other stuff underneath the browser as well. Java seems like the most common and most robust technology to use, but Flash evidently gets some usage in these guys.