Today, I (hope I) helped people

Today, I…

• built an OS X Universal binary
• attended a training course
• nearly deleted myself from the interwebs (long story)
• helped colleagues get their BlackBerries configured
• talked to people about Current Cost meters
• tried to fix an OLPC boot problem
• looked at a new customer engagement
• learned that a wonderful colleague was moving on.

This is what I do. Most days, it is good fun. Some days, it is a little full on.

Fedora 9 on a USB stick

Although you’ll most commonly hear me waxing lyrical about OS X these days, I’m a long-time Linux user. I’ve been running various flavours of Linux at home since Redhat 5.0 days.

Why Redhat and Fedora? Well, a good friend of mine noted a long time ago that it was the distribution likely to get the blessing of enterprise vendors as time went on. I’m not here to invite a flame war, and I’ve been impressed with a lot of other distros over the past couple of years in particular (while I keep meaning to give Ubuntu a “proper” run, I use it for development in VMWare Fusion on the Mac). I’ve run Fedora on a server and a workstation at home for a while now, and I’m always pretty keen to see what a new version has to offer.

Enter Fedora 9. I use my MacBook Pro pretty exclusively these days, so I just wanted a quick and easy way to see what Fedora 9 was like. I considered the Fusion option, but then read about the “Live USB” option. This is really nice… there’s a (currently Windows-based, sadly) desktop app that you run to select the “spin” of Fedora that you want, point it at an inserted USB memory key, and away you go… I chose Fedora 9 and let the Thinkpad download the image and then install it on my 1Gb USB stick. I also asked for a 200Mb “persistent overlay”, i.e. space that I could use for persistent storage of data like (I assume) my home directory. This is a far nicer option than a Live CD, as I can take my data with me.

A quick reboot, choosing a temporary boot device, pointing at the USB stick. The boot process was not all that promising, as it initially reported what looked like errors about inability to assign USB identifiers (or something), but it did all boot fine.

[click for a larger view]

In fact, it booted more than fine. I was pleased to find that Fedora 9 picked the “right” (i.e. max) resolution for my display straight away. The only customisation I needed to do to make the desktop more pleasant was to reduce the font size, but I can see why they went with the default size that they chose.

The next thing was to get myself online, or at least onto my home network. Based on past experience I went into the Network config under system preferences and started fiddling with the NIC settings. Didn’t work – although it could see the wireless card it didn’t want to let me join the network. Then I spotted the little wireless icon in the system tray at the top right of the screen, and clicking there let me join my home network immediately – with OS X levels of ease. Very impressive stuff.

Sound worked straight out of the box too… if I come across as surprised, remember I’ve been using Linux since RH 5 and I’m well aware of how flaky much of this stuff has been over the years.

Firefox worked fine, Pidgin let me configure my Google Talk account within seconds, taking a screenshot and editing in Gimp was no problem… this was a lovely experience overall. I was even able to install the Flash plugin for Firefox (although I had to download and install the RPM via sudo, rather than it just working via the Firefox addons installer).

All-in-all I was extremely impressed with the ease-of-installation and use. I’m not sure how often I’ll want to use this, but the fact that I have a fully-usable Linux distro on a bootable stick is just brilliant.

Linux box progress

Back in November, I made a hopelessly failed attempt to upgrade my main Linux workstation from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 6. This is a machine that I built myself – 2GHz AMD64 CPU, dual 160Gb SATA drives with software RAID 1 (mainly to protect my photos), NVIDIA graphics. The problem was that the upgrade process rendered the box unbootable – unable to find a kernel, and once I’d hacked at grub it was unable to load the relevant modules… I had to give up on it through lack of time.

This week I finally had some time to play. I was surprised to find that I hadn’t really missed the machine in 5 months, apart from the lack of access to my address book and quite a large number of photos. I knew that the data was at least safe, I just couldn’t get to it.

On Thursday I managed to get the system booting again. There had been two fundamental issues with the upgrade. The first was that the bootloader was broken. I had to boot into rescue mode, reinstall grub on both SATA drives, and hack the menu.lst file like this:

title RAID partition 1 Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/md3 rhgb quiet
initrd (hd0,0)/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

Now, this has the disadvantage that it is targetting a particular RAID drive – I need to look at making it disk-independent as it was before, but at least this is letting me load the kernel.

The second problem was that once it found the kernel image, it failed to load various modules (like via_sata, for example, which was fairly critical to the whole boot process). To fix this, I had to rebuild the initial RAM disk using mkinitrd… in the process discovering that I had obsolete options in modprobe.conf, like stuff telling scsi_mod to scan max_scsi_luns of 127, so I removed those.

Once I got the thing to boot, I had to clean up the networking, and then install months of Fedora updates.

The most important thing (!) about the whole process was that I wanted to get Beryl running for full GL-enhanced desktop goodness. I managed to do that this morning, although I had to reinstall the NVIDIA driver in order to prevent it from complaining about the GLcore module not being found, and then install the glx-utils package to get hold of all the glx programs like glxinfo and glxgears.

The final problem I’m faced with is overheating. It turns out that if the CPU runs at 1.6GHz or 2GHz it immediately heats up to ~75C and the system shuts itself down. This is despite having a fan+heatsink on the processor itself, and several fans in the machine… clearly not good enough. I’m currently running at 800MHz, which at least works. I need to find a better method of getting the machine cooled.

Posted whilst at White Leaf House [ plazes.com

Technorati Tags: beryl, Fedora, Linux, grub

Thank goodness for the command line

I’m trying to sort out some letters – trying to beat the Christmas posting dates (which we’ve failed to do, due to our holiday).

Unfortunately my Linux box is still dead, since I’ve not had time to tend to it properly and get it up-and-running. My address book is held in Evolution.

The FC6 boot CD, the “linux rescue” option, and some command-line tools came to my rescue.

Evolution stores the address book in Berkeley DB format. So, I booted into rescue mode, enabled my network interfaces, chroot’ed to /mnt/sysimage, and ran:

db_dump -p  /home/andyp/.evolution/addressbook/local/system/addressbook.db > /tmp/addr.out

Once I’d done that, I was able to FTP the resulting text file to my laptop, and use vi to search for the address entries (vcards) that I wanted. Primitive, but effective.

Technorati tags: command line, Linux, Fedora Core 6, Evolution, address, berkeley, DB

Paperweight / Linux box?

I attempted to upgrade my main workstation to Fedora Core 6 this weekend.

The upgrade itself went smoothly enough - I think. The new packages appear to be installed…

There’s just the small matter of being able to boot the thing. I’ve got a Linux Software RAID system. All of the partitions are RAID 1 on SATA. I’ve got /dev/md0 as the /boot partition, and /dev/md3 as /, /dev/md6 as /home, etc. - point being, it’s all RAID, see?

I remember this being a pain back in FC3 days, but I managed to get it working by installing GRUB on the MBR of both disks. This time, no dice.

If I boot into a rescue mode from the FC6 DVD, I can run grub:

grub> find /grub/stage1
  hd(0,4)
  hd(1,0)
  hd(2,0)
grub> device (hd1) /dev/sda
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)

This all works. Unfortunately, on boot, I find that it won’t find the kernel image.

I’ve edited grub.conf and told it that root=/dev/md3. Interestingly, on booting without the DVD, hd(0,0) is really the first SATA device, so I edited grub.conf to use fully-qualified paths to the boot graphic and kernel file – I know this got me further, as I started seeing the FC6 graphic GRUB screen when the machine started. However, I still get an error 15 (file not found) when it tries to load the kernel.

Gaaah. I hate GRUB. Why doesn’t this just work? I spent an hour twiddling with options on Saturday, but right now, I just can’t get anywhere

Thanks to Kelly for the inspiration for the title of this post…

Technorati tags: Linux, Fedora Core 6, Fedora, RAID, GRUB, bootloader, SATA

Fedora Core 6 round-up

I set my home workstation downloading the FC6 DVD ISO yesterday morning. I have to say that I never bothered going back to check that it came down successfully. Looking forward to an opportunity to get it installed… although I think I’m going to try an upgrade from FC4, which may not be advisable but I can’t face recreating various settings.

Here are some of the articles I’ve been reading to work myself into a state of anticipation at all the Linuxy goodness:

• Fedora Core 6 Review @ Linux Forums
• First Impressions of Fedora Core 6 @ Linux Format
• Fedora Core 6 in virtualized environment @ TekArtist

Technorati tags: Linux, Fedora, Fedora Core 6

New RawStudio

An open source competitor to Lightroom is RawStudio, which just hit version 0.4… nothing on the news page at the time of writing, but the tarball is available. If you are a Linux user, take a look. I’ll be compiling myself a copy as soon as a get a chance.

Technorati: rawstudio, raw, photography, Linux

The need for consistency in UIs

Two interesting discussions of user interface issues in recent or soon-to-be-released Microsoft products. Alan Lepofsky has written about some aspects of the Outlook 2007 user experience. Paul Thurrott has a great discussion of the horror that innocent users may face when Windows Vista is released. Things like, having the Back button in wizards at the opposite corner of the window from the Next button, and having it use an arrow icon while the other buttons are text. Joy.

In my view, one thing that GNOME got right with the 2.x releases has been an obsession with the Human Interface Guidelines. The HIG may not always be great; some argue that GNOME is too dumbed-down; and the HIG provides guidelines rather than rules. However, considering the way in which OSS is developed, there was a lot of potential for wildly differing UIs between applications, and yet GNOME has largely avoided this. Shame that Microsoft (one company, rather than a loose collection of programmers) couldn’t do the same!

Technorati: Windows, GUI, Vista, GNOME, Linux, Outlook, Microsoft, user+experience

Notes for Linux

Mosey on over to Ed Brill’s blog for some interesting news – Lotus Notes for Linux.

Google Earth for Linux

I’ve tried to run Google Earth under Wine on Linux once or twice, but I’ve always had problems with fonts and screen redrawing.

Now, the latest version of Google Earth is available with a Linux version. For all platforms, it looks like the UI has had a bit of a revamp, buildings can be textured, and it should work faster. Can’t wait to give it a try later.

Second Life: Linux, and scripting

I just discovered that there’s a dedicated blog for Second Life on Linux. Between 2 laptops and a workstation, I guess I only spend about a third of my time in SL on Linux, but it is good to know there is somewhere to follow the news.

My emerging interest in scripting in SL has been helped by these useful documents and tools:

• Using Linden Script Language
• LSL Tutorial
• lslint (syntax checker)

Now, I just need to find some time to actually create some objects – preferably something more useful than my existing cube with embedded script that doesn’t work…

Stay with Fedora, or wait for Vista?

OK, so the post title is a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Last weekend I downloaded the DVD ISO of Fedora Core 5. When I have time, I really need to update my home workstation – I’m hoping that the upgrade will be fairly smooth. Anyone else ever tried upgrading to FC5 from FC4 running on SATA with Linux Software RAID? I’m worried about the RAID thing – it bit me when I installed FC4, I never wrote down what I did to get it to work, and kernel upgrades in the last few months have panicked on boot, so I’m currently on a backlevel kernel.

So, Windows Vista then. Do I want it? Not on the basis of Paul Thurrott’s latest analysis…

Technorati tags: Fedora linux Vista