irrelevancy

I upgraded to Hardy over the weekend while I was sick. For the most part it was pretty uneventful. I use the Ubuntu variant on my school notebook, so I knew about the changes, but there doesn’t seem to be as much a difference in the Kubuntu variant. I just like the packages being up-to-date.

I installed the new KDE 4.0.4 and resolved to use it for about a week. I noticed the network was extremely slow. I thought maybe it was a problem with the desktop environment, as I hadn’t noticed it after the upgrade and before switching to KDE4.

Then I found this bug, affecting rt2500pci cards like my Linksys WMP54G. The card is incorrectly set to a 1M rate, instead of 54M. A simple $ sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M█ sets it right again.

I don’t usually get excited about Adobe products. They’re either restrictively expensive or horrible little scourges of the Web. Which is why I let news of Adobe AIR fly right by. I appreciate what I think they are trying to do. It’s certainly nice having a development platform accessible to the three major desktop operating systems. The few applications I’ve read about looked pretty slick.

In my never-ending quest for the perfect Twitter client, I installed AIR to check out the Spaz Twitter client. I tried it first on XP (work machine), and it’s very nice. Slick, but it is an early version and there are some little bugs here and there. AIR is still in beta for Linux and installed fine on this notebook running Ubuntu 8.04. AIR was nice enough to make sure that Firefox knew how to handle AIR application installs from the web, so Spaz was painless to install.

The AIR installer defaulted to ‘/opt/spaz’, which would have been okay except that it wasn’t initialized by a process that would give the installer root privileges, so I changed it to ‘/home/user/Programs/’ where I keep programs I install myself. Also, the fonts were not nearly as sharp as they were on XP. It was not affected by the sub-pixel hinting enabled by the desktop environment (the picture below was smoothed a bit from the jpg conversion, so it doesn’t look as bad). It may be looking specifically for Microsoft fonts, found in the ‘msttcorefonts’ package, which is not installed as web pages will use those instead of the lovely fonts installed by default. Also, the Spaz client took up ~30MB of memory, roughly the same as the Firefox instance that was running at the time.

I may use Spaz at home on my desktop, but it certainly isn’t ideal for this notebook due to memory limitations (a too-often recurring theme).

Spaz Twitter client under Ubuntu Hardy

I forgot you’re not supposed to edit the ‘/etc/sudoers’ file, which defines which users can assume administrative rights, by hand. As the first lines of the file will tell you, you should use ‘visudo’ to make changes. I guess I just don’t screw around with that file enough to remember that (or follow directions).

If you do try and edit the file, it will be read-only. You can use ‘sudo’ to change the permissions of the file to include write, but then ‘sudo’ will not work. And then you cannot use ‘sudo’ to change it back. Root can make the changes, but Ubuntu disables the root account by default (you just have to give it a password to enable it). I generally do not enable the root account as sudo works fine. If I do happen to be doing a lot of administration, I’ll just use ‘sudo’ to become root.

Alright, so nothing local will work. I boot up a trusty Knoppix CD and click the desktop icon for the hard drive’s root partition. Oh. I encrypted the file system. Damn. I did a little searching around to see if there was any easy to way to get Knoppix to decrypt the file system. It’s probably not that hard, but I didn’t find any easy answer that wouldn’t mean potentially screwing something up further. Not that I care about any of the data, but I have a very simple logic for situations like this:

if time_to_fix > time_to_reinstall then screw_it_reinstall

Which means more fun. I installed the Hardy alpha (now beta) and it worked great. Loved the little changes and appreciate the new features. But the install CD for Hardy has a bug where you can’t install with certain CD-ROM configurations. Lucky me, I have such a configuration. So, for the second time, I’m installing Gutsy just to upgrade to Hardy.

I haven’t upgraded my school notebook for the last couple terms. We’re finished with this term and the machine’s getting a little slow with all the hacking around and installing all sorts of stuff. So, I refreshed it with the latest Ubuntu alpha. I prefer a KDE desktop for heavier use, but for this school notebook I like to keep it simple and I like to see the changes with GNOME (that we don’t always get in the Kubuntu variant). The reinstall went smoothly and the machine is moving right along. Lot of nice little incremental changes. The new Firefox (3b4) is very nice, and sounds like it has some great changes.

After a reinstall, I’ll go through the repositories to see what’s new and I found the Prism applets in there. I’m sure I’ve heard of this somewhere, but I didn’t really see how useful it is, particularly for this notebook. I only really use it at school and mostly for Google Reader, Gmail, and OpenOffice. These Prism applets just take those web applications and separate them from the browser so they feel like individual desktop applications. I’ve found them to be very fast and saves me a lot of memory. They have a handful of pre-made applets, and there are some more user-made ones on the wiki, and you can also just set up a new applet for any page you like.

Overall, I’m very impressed with the speed and how easy it is on resources. If the school’s wireless were any kind of reliable, I could probably use Google Docs a lot more often. I love OpenOffice and it has progressed a hell of a lot, but it still drags a bit on an older PIII with 256MB of memory.

Mozilla Prism on Ubuntu 8.04

Classes are pretty tame this term. I have another Active Directory course which I find incredibly boring. Half the class has been basically a review of a couple classes we’ve already taken. Now, it seems, we’re learning The Microsoft Way. Which, as the instructors and anyone else with real-world experience knows, is the wrong way to go about things.

Now, I don’t think the name of this school is going to open any doors for me. The two things of importance are networking and experience. The school is small enough that I know just about everyone in my field of study and generally get along with everyone. I try to let instructors and other higher-ups what I intend to do with myself and we’ve had discussions about starting businesses, etc.

As for experience? I’ve been at my job for 10+ years, but nothing that has been particularly challenging. I feel like I have a lot of extra time at school, with hardware and software at my fingertips, but I’m not taking full advantage. Also, I feel like I’m going to need something tangible should I not have any more real-world experience by the time I graduate, which is rapidly approaching. We have art students and design students who will have portfolios by the time they’re finished with the curriculum, so what will I have?

We’ve done lots of projects in class, but nothing that was really fancy. Personally, I’m more interested in new stuff to poke around with and finding ways for technologies to work happily together. I’d like to develop some use cases for Linux migration or integration. I’ve been playing around with virtualization for a while, but I’m really getting into this VirtualBox. We finally have some decent hardware at school, so I’d like to put it to good use. It’s just a head full of ideas at this point, but I find it very motivating.