Planet TLLTS

Well, it’s only a month away now, or there abouts so I figured it was time to upgrade to Lucid. Typical of my previous experiences the upgrade was not that painful. In fact, aside from my trackpad, it was flawless. After being up and running all I had to do was alter this line in my /etc/modprobe.d/options files from

options psmouse proto=imps

to

options psmouse proto=exps*

and bam I was back in business.

I like the gnome theme in Lucid and gnome seemed faster than I’ve ever experienced it before. But, I’m largely a fluxbox guy so that is where I am now. Upgrades to Thunderbird are great, I really like version 3.0. And now that Lightning is working how could it get any better? Who knows? I’m sure the will find a way.

Well I am now considering the jump on my workstation at work. I look forward to the adventure and hope, for works sake, there is little to be done.

Lucid Lynx gets two thumbs up from me! Believe it!

Last night Linc posed a question on the show about how to get his Super (“Windows”) Key to fire up a terminal when he pressed it. He had done this easily in other distros but was having a problem with Mint 8. No matter what he tried through the standard tools it just was not working. Now I am not sure what all standard tools he tried, but I have run into this problem before. I’m not a big Gnome user but I have had to solve similar issues via the gconf-editor tool and here is how I did it.

First I made sure I knew the name of the key by using xev. Sure enough, in Mint as it is in just about every other distro, the key name is Super_L. Sometimes, it may be Mod4.

Second, I fired up gconf-editor and under apps found metacity. That is the “window manager” for gnome (or is it shell now? I suspect that will be replaced soon by gnome-shell). I opened that up and went to keybinding_commands. Since Linc wanted to run a terminal I figured we would have to set a terminal command to one of the run_commands. So for run_command_1 we set gnome-terminal.

Third, I switched from the keybinding_commands to global_keybindings which is right above the former and found the key assignment for run_command_1. The values I set for that was Super_L not between < and > like you would do for or .

That was it, now Super_L was mapped to run gnome-terminal.

Is there an easier way to do this? I don’t know. Tell us, because Linc could not find it.

So this wonderful listener sends me this G1 he no longer uses which is hands down friggin awesome. Thanks JC. I popped my sim card in and I’m smart phoning away. This thing is great. So I see a lot of people posting their favorite apps and figured I would drop some of mine and also what did not work too well for me.

For starters, MythMote is friggin awesome. Not only to be able to control my mythbox from anywhere in the house; but to mess with the kids. Hearing them shout “Daddy! Something is wrong with the tv again!” Is priceless. Worth every penny of free I spent. Setup on the mythtv end was a snap. Thanks for the hints Pat!

Sipdroid, a softphone, connected without a problem to the Asterisk box allowing me to make calls both to the meetme room and out through Broadvoice. Setup again was pretty straight forward and the first call I made to the wife great.

I wanted a running/walking tracker so I pulled two down. GPS Walk/Run Tracker and Run GPS Trainer lite. I took the GPS Walk/Run Tracker for a spin today on a run. It showed an analog speedometer indicating whether you were walking, running or cheating and a number for how fast you were going. When finished it told me the stats but I don’t think they were accurate. For starters it told me I walked for 20 minutes when I know it was over 25. It also said I did 0.803 miles when I know for a fact a quarter of that was a .5 mile walk. So I question the accuracy. Next time I will try the Run GPS Trainer lite. I fired that up just to take a look and I really liked what I saw. It had a google map at the top and a lot of information on the screen for tracking.

Game-wise I have found Robo Defense and Dungeon Wonder very fun. I recommend trying out both.

Finally I will make mention of Phone Flix. Now I am not interested in watching movies from the phone but I am excited that I can manage my netflix queue whenever I want. This way I don’t have to worry about trying to remember this awesome movie I just have to see.

There are many more apps tickling my fancy but that is enough for now.

Last week my oldest, Paige (11), somehow tanked her Koala system to the point that it would not even boot into stage1 GRUB. I was perplexed at what she had done but figured, all right, let’s wipe and re-install. I fired up my System76, dropped in a flash card and wrote Koala netbook remix to the flash and off I went; for about 30 minutes. After repeated reboots and two more unetbootin creations, nothing I would do allowed me to boot the install.

I had a copy of the latest Mint iso on the system having ventured the idea of installing that on Paige’s eeePC last time and figured this time I would give it a go. A few minutes later I was in installing Mint and boy was she happy afterwards. She claimed this was the best distro she has used yet.

The wife’ gnome desktop borked somehow, I suspect Avery’s little fingers somehow did something; but maybe not. This is the second time something went squirrely after she was started using the system pretty heavily. I don’t think it was the configuration or anything because even a new profile would not work. Thus, I settled for installing Mint there.

The wife seems pretty happy so far. While Mint is not light years different from Ubuntu standard, it is a very polished interface and comes with a fantastic set of default packages requiring almost no additional work on my part: And that is a great thing.

Me, I am going to stick with Debian on the Meso, Arch on the Desktop, and Ubuntu on my laptop and work workstation with slackware and centos on the servers. But it is nice to have a varied collection of distros in constant use.

This past week I have gravitated to using Google-Chrome and Chromium more and more and I have to say I am loving it. Everything just works, and works rather snappy. The biggest contention I have with web browsing would be the results of Flash being a friggin hog and tending to crash the browser. I have not noticed as many problems with Flash under Chrom(e|ium). No slow downs, mouse interactions work, and multiple flash elements on a page do not destroy the performance.

I installed Chrome on my wife’s eeePC and she is just loving it. That is where she spends all her time now. “Amazing” she says! She confessed the other night to absolutely loving Google-Chrome.

What can I say? Google has done a bang up job with this browser. I am even using it more and more at work! My only gripe, originally, was with newly created tabs spawning next to the current tab I was in. I had been accustomed to the tabs spawning at the end of the tab row. There is a plugin to alter this behavior called tabby. What tabby does is move the newly created tab to the end of the tab row after it is created. The effect is noticeable as you see a bit of “jumpiness” in the tab bar. Not that distracting and you eventually begin to ignore. But, I must admit that I can see the benefit of tabs spawning next to the current one and I am tempted to go back to this behavior.

The latest builds of Firefox 3.6 seem to default to this behavior. To fix it you have to go into about:config and set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. Chances are you will get warnings that this may violate your warranty. I never knew there was a warranty for Firefox. Anyway, be aware that this warning has a checkbox that says don’t show me this warning anymore. If you don’t click it you will get that message every time you start Firefox.

Happy browsing!

So Linc posts about his VMware woes, and I too have experienced some mysterious issues these past couple of weeks, primarily with my Asterisk image. The asterisk server would mysteriously shut down with no warnings and nothing coherent I can see in the log files. To top it off, I had my main server image go haywire requiring a reboot on Monday and then it was just down the other morning. Again, no indication as to the problem has yet been discovered.

Imagine my surprise when my Meso battery would not charge. Recall that Linc had mentioned his Acer batter not charging for some reason a few episodes back on TLLTS. I had it plugged in at work yesterday and then all night last night. When I fired it up the battery was still dead. I have it on now and plugged in and it seems to be charging though, so I hope my issues are not the same as Linc. It’s at 15% now and climbing; maybe I am out of the woods.

Never-the-less, if you are having problems of late it’s probably Linc’s fault. Remember to remind him.

Won’t you join Klaatu in his multimedia quest? I noticed that the other day I failed to post some pertinent information regarding the multimedia sprint. Once again I failed Klaatu. I hope he can forgive me:

When: January 26th from 14:00-0600 Eastern Standard Time

Where: irc.binrev.net #media

What: Linux Multimedia “extra content” Sprint

Why: Linux multimedia users want raw materials, but there’s no reason every single Linux user should have to go out and do the same leg work as every other Linux user; let’s band together, find the free content, and share it in just a few easy-to-find and easy-to-download packages.

Hopefully that will vindicate me once more in his eyes. Klaatu is a harsh task master, that he is.

I come home from work Friday night to find the MythTV box running a browser looking up Thomas Jefferson on Wikipedia. My daughter was reading up on the President and decided to use the MythTV box instead of her eeePC. Back in the day we would have to pull the right encyclopaedia volume off the book shelf or get Mom or Dad to drive us to the Library for research. Kids these days have it so easy….

Well it is good to see that she is using the technology for purposes other than watching tv or catching up on anime episodes off Animefreak.tv. I must saying, watching full screen anime from Animefreak.tv is a wonderful experience on the mythbox. Why can it not be the same way for Hulu?

Back on January 8, 2010 Klaatu sent me a great email about a project he is kicking off on January 26, 2010 and I was remiss in playing the announcement on the show. Well, I am trying to get the word out now. So without further wordiness from me and in his own words:

Running the server without the fans is probably not a good idea since I could cook an egg on the box. Well. that has prompted me to only run the workstation when needed and rely more on the other systems I have. The biggest detriment was to my email filtering as I was relying on Thunderbird to shuffle my emails into their proper folders. It was finally time to get off my lazy butt and learn procmail. This was pretty darn easy to do and now my email gets filtered properly without the need of a client.

What am I going to do with my workstation now?