hello, hellm

I was interested in using a GNU/Linux distro on my desktop - it’s been Windows forever, and I had been reluctant to give up my workflow habits (though I’ve been developing under Ubuntu on my laptop for about three years).  First, I tried the live CDs for both Fedora and Mandriva.  I didn’t get really detailed in my assessment, but I didn’t like that Mandriva was immediately trying to upsell me into a paid distro, and I prefer Gnome to KDE.  So Fedora it is.

My first step was running easyLife, which got me set up with good settings and packages.  Like sudo - how could I live without it.  easyLife also installs Thunderbird and the Flash player, among many other things.

(I was pretty happy that Fedora’s default keyboard shortcuts included ctrl-alt-delete for the logout action.  I’ve set that up on the Ubuntu installations I’ve done for a while.)

My next step will be to configure the xorg settings for my trackball, something I never got right on the Ubuntu install on my workstation at my erstwhile employer.  I have a Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman; it saves my shoulder from RSIs, and it would be nice to get the orientation and buttons set correctly.  I was planning to use this as a starting point, and if everything works out, that project will probably deserve its own post.

I’ll update this more as I make progress…

I was pretty excited to upgrade to Firefox 3 beta 5, but I knew I could expect some extensions to crap out on me for a while before they were updated by their maintainers.  I threw caution to the wind and updated Ubuntu.  “Eek!” I cried, “no Firebug!”  Firebug is one of my indispensible front-end tools.  I love it (and depend on it!).  So, I looked around the internets a bit, and decided to try the 1.1 beta.  No luck.  Then I learned that there’s an Ubuntu package for firebug.  Here’s what to do:

1. upgrade to Firefox 3 (you’ve probably already done that part!)
2. uninstall your current (broken) Firebug from the Tools > Add-Ons window
3. run “sudo apt-get install firebug” from the command line

That should do it.

I followed these instructions:
http://www.php.ph/2007/12/21/centos-5-eaccelerator-installation/

But with one exception: don’t extract the eaccelerator tar to /tmp, as it won’t let you phpize, (maybe because the /tmp partition is mounted noexec?).

Today, the mediatemple (dv) 3.5 was released. To my pleasure, its php is compiled with the tokenizer module, which is required for the software I’m deploying, so I’ve decided to give the (dv) another try.

The developer tools now include svn! You don’t need to follow these instructions to install subversion - just create a support request with MediaTemple to install the developer tools. If you need yum, the command below should add it successfully.
Mysteriously, neither the default packages nor the “developer’s tools” include subversion, and how could we live without subversion? When I searched for handy instructions on how to go about installing it, I found only links to my previous post. This post serves as an update for the (dv) 3.5.

The 3.5 edition is running on CentOS 5, so we need the rpm for that version:

$ rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/yum-3.0.5-1.el5.centos.5.noarch.rpm

[the above command is updated from yuri's comment that the dependencies are included in a stock (dv). thanks! yuri also says that subversion is now included in the developer tools. i haven't yet confirmed it, but it's wonderful if true! it's true, and wonderful.]

Check if it’s installed:
$ rpm -q yum

With yum installed successfully, we can use it to install Subversion.
$ yum install subversion

That should do it.

A client was having some ongoing trouble with Ubuntu Dapper getting confused about which sound card to use with Skype - and whether to use a sound card at all. They didn’t have any need for the PC speaker, so we took the easy way out on their machines: we disabled the onboard card in the BIOS. Works like a charm!

Over the weekend, I took the leap to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. This was a much smoother process than my last upgrade. My wireless broke again, but all I had to do was undo my “fix” for ndiswrapper, installing the latest version:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils-1.8

After a restart, my wireless card was recognized, and Network Manager took care of the rest. I must say: so far this distribution is making me pretty happy. It’s really starting to feel like the promise: everything just works.

[Updated for the dv 3.5 here]

I’m currently testing a web application on a MediaTemple “dedicated virtual server” (dv). This means I need to have Subversion installed to check the current version of the application from the repository. Unfortunately, while MediaTemple installs Subversion on their (oft-derided) “grid-server” (gs), they don’t install it on the (dv).

What to do? I put in a request with MediaTemple, but after vainly waiting 24 hours for a response, I decided to use yum to install Subversion. This seems like a better idea than working with rpms; the likelihood is that I’ll need to install other packages, after all. Yum doesn’t come with the (dv), however - for reasons unknown - so the first thing we need to do is get yum (following this post) [in a comment below, Bart has updated the location of the rpms].

$ wget http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-1.c4.noarch.rpm

$ wget http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm

$ wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm

It has dependencies, so we need get them too.

$ rpm -ivh --nodeps http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-python-2.6.16-6.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-4.2.1.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/rpm-python-4.3.3-18_nonptl.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm

$ rpm -ivh –nodeps http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-python-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/rpm-python-4.3.3-22_nonptl.i386.rpm http://centos.mirror.vpslink.com/centos-4/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm

$ rpm -ivh –nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-python-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/rpm-python-4.3.3-23_nonptl.i386.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm

Now we can install yum:

$ rpm -Uvh yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm

Check if it’s installed:

$ rpm -q yum

With yum installed successfully, we can use it to install Subversion.
$ yum install subversion

That should do it.

-

I should add that I didn’t know at first what flavor of Linux was running on MediaTemple’s (dv). I found that we were dealing with CentOS 4.4 by running:

$ cat /etc/*release /etc/*version

I’m a fan of the Mozilla application icons, and I find the Ubuntu replacements for Firefox and Thunderbird a bit disorienting. That’s why I’ve used a script to restore the Mozilla icons. I was mildly dismayed to find it didn’t work after upgrading to Edgy - that’s because “Edgy is the first version of Ubuntu that symlinks /bin/sh to /bin/dash instead of /bin/bash” (says rama001). Like it says in the first link above, use this instead:

sudo bash restore_mozilla_icons

Or change the first line of the script to:

#! /bin/bash

I’d waited this long to upgrade to Edgy because I’d heard stories about X not working after upgrade (I’m rather partial to my graphical user interface) and I’ve spent some time wrangling with ndiswrapper and Network Manager to get my laptop’s internal Broadcom adapter working with WPA encryption, so I felt sure that would break.

Good thing I decided to try this on my laptop first. First, I had no X - despite that both xserver and ati support were installed. That meant that the fixes suggested for other users, installing or reinstalling those packages, wouldn’t work. Of course, I tried anyway, but to no avail. I decided to run the reconfigure wizard for xorg, and the conf file it created let me login to X. I haven’t looked at the files to determine the actual cause, but it’s clear that Edgy found something awry in the conf that worked with Dapper.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

And my wireless was gone. The culprit, as it so often is, is ndiswrapper. I tried a few approaches, but the one that seems to have done the trick (let me know if this doesn’t work, or if there’s a better solution):

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.8
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils-1.1

I was getting an error running modprobe ndiswrapper before this approach. Afterward, it ran successfully.

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

However, Network Manager couldn’t see my wireless card until I restarted X (restarting the Network Manager daemon and other network services wouldn’t do it). When X came back up, so did my wireless connection.
Success!