Planet TLLTS

This is the final chapter in the saga of my broken Thinkpad T23.

Many of you know that I have been using my T23 for testing distributions lately, and before that for a headless server. The reason for that is that the machine has this flaky video problem where sometimes it works, sometimes it does not and other times it “sort of” works. As you can imagine, that is not very conducive to testing out desktop distributions. I certainly has been problematic lately.

I have been lamenting what to do with this especially this month as I have been trying to generate some content for the blog. How am I to do distro testing and such without a desktop machine to test on? The solution came the other day in an email from an old LUG member.

It seems that Stuart, a member of my old LUG, who’s mailing list I am still subscribed to, had a couple spare laptops he was offering up. He posted them to the list and I just happened to be watching my email when the post went through. I jumped at the chance to replace my old beater with something almost as old but fully functional. I arranged to go pick up my new(old) machine that very night.

For a measly $25 and 4 hours worth of drive time I picked up a nice little Thinkpad X31. It has 1.5gb of ram, 120gb hdd, internal wireless B and G and will make a great little laptop to do multitudes of testing on. It even came with Windows 7.

Now I didn’t keep Windows on the laptop, in fact it got a clean Linux install the second it hit my house, but on the way home, I did get a change to check out W7 a little bit. Honestly, I think XP was windows done in crayon and 7 is windows done in maybe sharpie or something. In my opinion, Windows 7 is trying very hard to be a rip-off of OS X, except they have this cartoonish interface. It’s not very professional looking (to me anyway) and I can tell you for sure that Linux on the same machine completely blows it out of the water. In two words, I found it cartoonish and clunky.

Just to tantalise you a little, since I brought the machine home I have attempted to install 5 concurrent distributions on it and actually put 2 of them on. I also learned a lot in the process about Grub 2, but all that is for a different post on a different day, so keep watching and reading!

I have heard, so many times now, that windows is simply just easier to use than Linux. Some people say it’s more intuitive. Well, today I had the pleasure of having to configure a network printer on my windows xp vm, and I call bullcrap.

Now let me put things in perspective a little bit. I have been using Linux almost exclusively for a very long time now and I do recall watching and using it through it’s growing pains when many things weren’t quite as easy as they should have been. We, however, have come a long way, baby.

Now I haven’t really extensively used windows in quite a while so I may be a little handicap for me, and it also might insinuate that I am partial to Linux’s way of doing things. You’d probably be right, but let’s just compare what needed to happen to get the very same printer configured on windows xp and on Ubuntu 8.04(lts).

Windows XP:
Start->Settings->Printers and Faxes->Add a Printer->Next->Local Printer. Now this is where it completely lost me. *I* was under the impression that I was trying to access a NETWORK printer. However, the local windows admin assured me that I had to choose “local”. You click next and let windows *fail* scanning for a local printer and then click next again and “Create a new port” (Whaa??). Pick standard TCP port->Next-Enter your printer’s IP address which will create a port name for you, then click next. Click finish and wait for windows to find your printer. Then you select your printer make and model from the dropdowns. The rest is a series of clicking “next” or “finish” until it finally prints a test page.

Ubuntu 8.04:
System->Administration->Printing->New Printer->Pick printer from scanned printers list->pick make (already highlighted)->pick model (already highlighted)->Look through additional hardware list (or just press forward)->pick a printer name and click apply. Yes, that’s it. Really. And, I am told it’s easier yet on the new Ubuntu (haven’t tried yet).

To be fair, I do remember when getting printing working on a Linux/Unix box was a complete nightmare, but my point is that *Linux* has advanced _considerably_. ‘Nuff said.

I know, I know. I wrote earlier about how the T23 was suffering some sort of display death again and would undoubtedly end up on freelinuxbox.org. While that is definitely true, I was looking at it today and thought I’d start it up again and let it do it’s updates. I did and the display was working the whole time, so I thought I would play with it a little more….:

I wanted to test getting some multimedia playback on this distribution. You see, RedHat based distributions are notorious for following the letter of the law and not letting you have access to any of those nasty codecs we all like to use. You know the ones I am talking about, mp3, wmv, dvd, etc.. Well, since I just happened to be traveling abroad in europe for a few minutes where this is completely legal, I decided to have a go at it.

A quick search brought me to this website and the directions looked pretty thorough so that’s where I started. The only thing I added to the process was adding vlc, my favorite media player, and everything else worked beautifully. To recap, follow these instructions, taken from the previously mentioned website and only edited to add vlc.

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uhv http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum -y install libdvdcss libdvdread libdvdplay libdvdnav lsdvd mplayerplug-in mplayer mplayer-gui compat-libstdc++-33 flash-plugin gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly vlc
wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm ; rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm
wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm; rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm

Now a couple notes….

Although I have not yet rebooted to check if that has any effect, the default media player, Totem, still does not play very much. While slightly dissapointed, I never really liked Totem anyhow and found that to be the case on almost every distribution. VLC, however, works exactly as expected, which is, perfectly.

I also took pains to install xmms, my favorite mp3 player on the T23 as well and, although it installed fine from the Dag repos, it doesn’t play a dang thing. VLC to the rescue again. In fact, I hadn’t realized that VLC actually makes such a good audio player!

It is important to also note that I still really feel that this CentOS desktop runs quite well - very snappy. I know I keep saying that, but it really is quite noticeable on this older laptop.

One of my favorite applications to make DVD backups released a new version. HandBrake 0.9.4 is available for download and installation. I can’t wait to try this out on my Ubuntu systems this weekend. Highly recommended.

A few days ago my storage facility emailed me and asked me to take a quick customer survey. I obliged.

Dear Lincoln, Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about your experience with Extra Space Storage?

My understanding is that you folks just took over the storage space I have been using for some time now so I am not entirely sure most of my problems are related to your company. What I can say for sure is when I initially signed up there, the clerk was really a jerk to us and obviously had no idea what he was doing. He made several snide comments and it took me 4 phone calls to get our access code. I would have left then, but this was the closest facility to me that didn’t charge exorbitant prices. You have since fixed the price point and are charging me as much as possible. The last time I visited my non-climate controlled unit, I found all my possessions covered in leaves and cobwebs and other miscellaneous flora, as if there has been some squirrel or rat or other critter in there. I didn’t bother even reporting it since I had such a horrible experience with the worker I ran into when I first signed up. At this point, the moment I can find a cheaper facility I am gone to take my chances there. At almost $50 a month for a 5×5 non-climate controlled unit with a crappy door and some mongoose living in it unattended I feel as if I am truly getting ripped off every time the bill comes due. And someone needs to fix the exit keypad that you literally have to hold up while you punch the digits. Apparently someone ran it over and the resourceful staff there have it professionally fixed with an old bungee cord.

Today in the U.S.A. we are celebrating Thanksgiving Day, which is a day where we try and remember what we are really thankful for. I thought I would share my hot list.

I am thankful for my God. Many don’t like it and most don’t understand, but my life changed dramatically when I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Before that point I felt that I was simply spiraling into the abyss. I was in a bad place. He turned that around for me.

I am thankful for my family. I may not always say it, but these people are my immediate support system and it’s for them and because of them that I can manage to get up in the morning most days and function.

I am thankful for my friends. This includes all of you, who read this stuff and send me encouraging emails and such. Thank you wherever you are and I hope you have a great Thanksgiving day too!

It’s Thanksgiving and I’m sitting down here in South Carolina while the feast is being prepared. I have a nice internet connection and am soon going out for run, so things are great.

The wife hurt her back this week cleaning out the rabbit cage. She was taking it outside and slipped on the steps and landed on the stoop with a crushing blow to her butt. Luckily she did not break anything but she is pretty much laid up for at least the week. The drive down for her was painful, that it was.

I’m thankful for my wife and two daughters most of all. Without them life would not be as fun and awesome.

I’m thankful for my parents and extended family, their support and love over the years has been fantastic.

I’m thankful for my friends both old and new, across the world. I learn so much from you and value the time I get to spend with you be it physical or virtual.

I’m thankful for Linc, Allan, Pat, Joel, Dave, Chad, ThreeThirty and Klaatu of TLLTS for the wonderful shows we have done and their friendship that has both encouraged and challenged me over the years.

I’m thankful for all our listeners both the vocal and silent, the encouraging and discouraging. You keep me going and challenged to do better.

Have a great day everyone and enjoy life to the fullest!

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Americans. It’s time to count our blessings and enjoy a great meal with friends and family. I’ve been running Mythbuntu 9.10 for several weeks now and overall I’ve been pretty happy with it. One of my initial gripes with the shutoff menu option not appearing in my main MythTV system was easily addressed. You can go into the setup in the running frontend and check off that you want the shutoff menu option to appear. I guess the assumption is that that a backend system will always be on. Fair enough. One item I am going to investigate for setup is Mirobridge. This plugin will enable any videocasts subscribed via Miro to appear in the recorded shows menu. You assign an unused channel (999 by default) to it. After watching the show it then gets migrated to Mythvideo. Very cool. You then setup a cron entry to run mirobridge automatically every night. I’ll try setting it up this weekend and report back next week. One plugin that I’ve never actually used in the past is MythFlix. This plugin lets you view your Netflix video queue and rental history. The only requirement is that you have an active Netflix account. The setup is not 100% automatic but fairly straightforward. It works as advertised. Another thing I may want to play around with is the new Storage Groups setup for Mythvideo. This will supposedly make pulling in metadata for your videos much easier to pull down via JAMU and sharing out the data to other frontend systems. Previously you had to manually pull down the metadata on every frontend.

Ok, one more recipe. I just love this stuff.

* 1/2 lb of elbow noodles
* 1 cucumbers
* 1 small onion (red is pretty)
* 1 cup your favorite mayonnaise
* Salt / Pepper
* 3 or 4 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar
* 3 or 4 Tbsp milk

Cook noodles, dice cucumber, dice small onion extra small, mix in bowl.
Mix together cup of mayo, 2 or 3 tablespoons of vinegar, salt, pepper and 2 or 3 tablespoons of milk to make the dressing. Taste it - you may need/want to add more vinegar. Should be thin enough to pour over macaroni mix. Mix it up and let it sit a while for best tastiness.

Note that I do not like eggs, so there are none in this salad, however, this macaroni salad recipe is particularly forgiving and you can easily add eggs, celery, bell peppers, etc. with a wonderful result.

This is making me hungry just reading it. MMMmmmmm.

Previously I had complained about the problem with flash clicks not registering in the browsers of current Linux distros. I had settled upon the fix to hold down the middle mouse button and left click where I wanted. While that worked all the time, it was a pain to do on my meso where I only have two buttons. I have to hold the right button down and left click but this invariably brings up the flash menu which I have to then work around.

There is a fix for nspluginwrapper which seems successful for me under my Ubuntu workstation at work and that is to add the line:

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

before the last line in /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer and restart my browser. But, I don’t have nsplugwrapper on my meso which is running Debian. So I found this:

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=TRUE firefox

And while that works I don’t want to have to type that in every time I want to run a the browser of my choice. So I created a simple script to do it for me. Nothing special here! I created a file called browser in my ~/bin directory:

#!/bin/bash
GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 %1

And that is that! So now when I want to run midori all I have to do is type:

browser midori

And I am good to go. Oh, yeah, I type this in fbrun which is why I don’t have a special icon or I am not using bash history in the terminal.

Works for me for now and I did not have to modify a file that is owned by a package which may result in complaints when said package gets updated. Hooha!