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.

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.

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

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.

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…

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

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.

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

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

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…

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

Some interesting thoughts on the RedHat and JBoss combination:

• Redmonk’s analysis of the acquisition, including thoughts on the implications for IBM.
• A tidbit with more thoughts on WebSphere, linking to another Redmonk analyst’s view of the deal.
• An article on O’Reilly – is a true open source model (Geronimo) better?
• A “retrospective” comment on JBoss, with a characteristically witty viewpoint, from The Register.

A few months ago, I blogged a bit about Java, Application Servers and RedHat.

Today, RedHat announced that they are acquiring JBoss. I’m stunned – where did that come from?! Last I’d heard, they were supporting JOnAS and thinking of shipping Geronimo. And I thought Oracle were after JBoss. Shows how well I keep up with the news.

This is an interesting situation.

As of now, to get nVidia drivers working on FC5, you have to jump through hoops. This has partly to do with the FC5 kernel and partly to do with the driver….

[Via Eudyptula minor]

Well, that puts off my upgrade to FC5 for a while.

Technorati tags: Linux Fedora nVidia

So you've been bitten by the Flickr bug. You update your photostream regularly. Wouldn't it be great if your screensaver could show you your pictures, your favourites, those of your contacts, or others based on tags or groups? I've found two good Flickr screensavers:

• Flickr.Net screensaver – requires the .Net framework.
• Slickr – this one uses OpenGL to do panning and fading.

I'd love one for Linux…

Technorati tags: Flickr screensaver

One of the big annoyances I always had with Java was how bad rich client / desktop applications looked. They can be ugly, and even with Swing, the look and feel often never quite matched the native desktop… this was particularly true on Linux, and I was also disappointed with the lack of antialiased (smoothed) fonts for Swing GUIs on Windows until recently.

Ensode.net has some screenshots of the new GTK look and feel that is due to come along in Mustang (aka Java 1.6), and it does seem that it is likely to be a much better match for my Linux GNOME desktop.

Of course, this isn't enough to sway me away from SWT, which always looks completely native, and as a programming framework it gets richer by the day. developerWorks has an article comparing AWT, Swing and SWT, and a tutorial on how to migrate your applications from Swing to SWT.

I went through the Linux Distribution Chooser test. Apparently I'm either a Fedora or a SuSE man – not a surprise since my Linux history started about 8 years ago flipping between SuSE and Redhat, and has progressed to Fedora.

Demonstrating that I have a sense of humour (and I'm sure most of my colleagues do, too), I'm going to share this link to the Uncyclopedia's page about IBM.

I know that Wikipedia has been getting a lot of bad press lately, but I've personally never had too many problems with it. The Uncyclopedia is a fun parody, though. When you arrive, you are greeted with the message:

Welcome to Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

… it seems to be rather well put together, so far.

Warning: some of the content may be offensive. I've not dug too deeply, I went straight for the IBM definition. The definition of Linux (or rather, DorkWare for Dweebs) is pretty amusing, too

(I first picked up news of the Uncyclopedia over on James Governor's blog)

Technorati tags: wikipedia uncyclopedia ibm linux joke parody

Thunderbird 1.5 is getting on my nerves.

As I mentioned earlier, the News and Blogs (aka RSS/Atom) support is much enhanced over 1.0.x… but having used it for a few hours now, the interface really sucks. It really should be simpler to add, delete and organise feeds.

Not only that, but in 1.5 the News and Blogs folder defaults to loading the web page for each feed rather than displaying the textual summaries, so you have to be online all the time. I've got a web browser for looking at the web pages if I want to. You can change this (the non-obvious series of clicks is right-click News and Blogs -> Properties -> tick "By default, show the article summary instead of loading the web page") but you don't seem to be able to do it on a global basis for all the feeds you already subscribe to; you have to go through the list in Manage Subscriptions, edit each one, and tick the article summary option.

I know there are dedicated applications like RSS Bandit available. On my Linux workstation I use Liferea, which is really nice. I wanted to continue to use Thunderbird, since I already use it for newsgroups, and for managing IMAP accounts. At this rate, I'm rapidly going to lose my patience.

Technorati tags: mozilla thunderbird rss atom feeds liferea rssbandit

About midday yesterday, I found that I couldn't connect to my webmail. I run SquirrelMail on my Linux server at home, pulling email from about 7 different accounts I have dotted around the Internet, and aggregating it all for me in one place. I have a DynDNS address where I can access my server, so that my email is always available. If it is unavailable, it usually means that my home ADSL connection has gone down, or there has been a power cut and something hasn't restarted properly.

Yesterday, it turned out to have been a power cut. I got home to find that my entire home network was down, wireless wasn't working, my workstation hadn't restarted at all, and my server was unable to connect to the Internet since the router was refusing to connect, for some reason.

I don't have a UPS. I know, I know, I really should have one. I've just never gotten around to spending money in that direction. Not only that, but I'm not sure I have enough space under the desk, and every time I look into it I get confused about what I really need. A neighbour recently gave me a conditioned power supply with a single plug on one side, and 4 standard power sockets on the other, harvested from an office that was being closed down… but that just has surge protection rather than a battery backup.

Yesterday's failure was fairly bad, but not catastrophic. I run Linux Software RAID on my workstation, so I have two copies of my data and I'm not terrified of data loss there (yes, there are backups too). My server is not RAIDed, although it probably ought to be. These days it just runs my mail, web and news servers really – there's not a lot else I need from it.

The workstation failed to restart twice, but I think that was partly down to the ADSL connection still being down and various services (like NTP synchronisation) hanging. I also had a very strange problem where the X server didn't want to come back up at boot time, complaining about missing fonts. Once I'd ssh'd over from the server (which restarted and recovered from the ext3 journal without problems) I was able to kill the hanging boot services, and start X from the command line. Note to self – remember that you can check the status of the RAID array by looking at the contents of /proc/mdstat and using mdadm to force synchronise the members if needed.

Finally, the router. It simply wouldn't connect to my ADSL provider. A simple reboot fixed that problem, and the wireless connectivity too.

So I'm in the market for a UPS. It needs to support two machines as a minimum, and also to be Linux compatible. Oh, and not to cost a fortune… I need the rest of my money for a new lens for my camera…

Technorati tags: linux ups power raid uninterruptible webmail

There is increasing coverage of Adobe Lightroom, a new RAW workflow tool. This follows a lot of noise about Apple’s Aperture application. I’ve not lost much sleep over Aperture, mainly because I don’t have a Mac – and although they are very desirable machines, I’m not expecting to go there any time soon[*]. Also, some of the coverage of Aperture has been more than a little mixed in the levels of praise, for an application that puts such a dent in the wallet.

Lightroom sounds interesting, since it will run on Windows as well, and Adobe clearly already have a lot of experience in digital imaging. I like the look of the application. The layout reminds me a lot of my RAW tool of choice, RawShooter Premium. The features are tempting – Lightroom can work not only with RAW files, but with JPEG, TIFF and PSD… JPEG at least is something I would use, and probably TIFF too. The Greyscale Mixer and the number of processing options are exciting – with RawShooter I sometimes have to switch to The Gimp for some post-processing. Of course, pricing hasn’t been announced yet – if it competes favourably with RawShooter, I might even be tempted.

[*] I’m sidestepping the fact that none of these apps run on Linux, which they clearly could do if the writers made an effort… it’s just disappointing.

Technorati tags: rawshooter adobe apple pixmantec raw photos imaging aperture lightroom

I find it fairly unlikely that the legendary (in Red Hat, Linux and GNOME circles anyway) Havoc Pennington is going to read my blog, but over in his latest entry Log for December, 2005 he mentions the need to replace his X-series ThinkPad.

Like Havoc, I've noticed that the rate of progress in laptop design appears to have slowed – the current ThinkPads are not massively different to those that were around, say, 2 years ago, although you generally get more bells-and-whistles such as the funky fingerprint readers and hard disk "airbags". Personally, I think the T-series ThinkPads are impossible to beat. Perfect combination of svelte design and power. I always long for a laptop with a higher memory capacity, of course… my work T40 is ageing somewhat and I'd love to break the 2Gb barrier with my next machine, along with a disk larger than 80Gb. On the other hand you do pay a bit more for the T-series range. Well worth it, in my opinion.

If you are thinking of running Linux on your ThinkPad, don't forget the awesome ThinkPad Configuration Tool for Linux, the Linux on ThinkPads mailing list, and the ThinkPad section of the Linux on Laptops website. Oh, and I ought to add that although I work for IBM, I don't endorse either of these sites in any official capacity – my opinions on these things are entirely my own.

Technorati tags: linux thinkpad laptop

I just treated myself to a little MP3 player from Tesco. They are down to £9.97 in-store (still £19.99 online). It is a small USB stick, 256Mb with a blue backlit display. Apart from anything else I could do with the extra storage for transferring files, and with the onboard MP3/WMA capabilities this is great… I'm one of the unwashed masses lacking an iPod.

I thought it would be a good idea to record how I got it recognised on my Fedora Core 4 system, since it took me a while…

Using information from the Debian Administration pages I learned quite a bit about the way udev is supposed to work. I think I've got it, now.

I plugged the stick into the nearest USB port and it was recognised by the kernel:

Dec 23 18:26:44 castor kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered.
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: Vendor: SigmaTel Model: MSCN Rev: 0100
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 04
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: SCSI device sdd: 493568 512-byte hdwr sectors (253 MB)
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: sdd: Write Protect is off
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: SCSI device sdd: 493568 512-byte hdwr sectors (253 MB)
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: sdd: Write Protect is off
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: sdd: sdd1
Dec 23 18:26:49 castor kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sdd at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

The next step (actually not directly the next step for me – I spent ages fiddling around with hal before realising this is handled by udev… but if you're following this, it should be your next step) was to create a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules containing this line:

BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="MSCN ", KERNEL="sd?1", NAME="%k", SYMLINK="mp3player"

The information in quotes for SYSFS{model} was taken from a file called model in the /sys filesystem:

[andyp@castor ~]$ find /sys -name model
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:10.4/usb1/1-6/1-6.2/1-6.2:1.0/host3/target3:0:0/3:0:0:0/model
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0f.0/host1/target1:0:0/1:0:0:0/model
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0f.0/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/model
/sys/devices/platform/host2/target2:0:6/2:0:6:0/model

(the first one of those files – I opened it using vi as I needed to check exactly how many trailing spaces there were)

What this achieves is that when this model of device is plugged in, udev creates a symbolic link /dev/mp3player pointing at whichever /dev/sdX device the kernel has created it at.

Then I edited /etc/fstab:

/dev/mp3player /media/mp3player auto auto,user 0 0

I created a mount point called /media/mp3player.
I restarted udev and unplugged the device. The next time I plugged it in, /dev/mp3player magically appeared. In GNOME I could mount the device. I then assigned a custom icon to the device (an iPod – I can dream!) and away I went.

Technorati tags: linux mp3 fedora udev usb GNOME

… and being the techie that I am, decided to have a play with WebSphere Application Server Community Edition. I uninstalled the pre-release software I'd looked at previously, and followed a nice tutorial from the WebSphere Developer Technical Journal to get the Daytrader sample deployed and running.

All works well. The only thing I'm struggling with is that the process of installing the sample "magically" created some JMS destinations… but trying to configure them manually via the admin console causes stack traces in the log and no destinations get created. Probably just my install.

A few weeks ago I learned that Fedora Core 5 is slated to include an Open Source app server called JOnAS. Yesterday the Geronimo blog mentioned that RedHat and Novell are planning to ship Apache Geronimo and Apache Derby (nee IBM Cloudscape) in their Linux distributions. WAS CE is of course based on Geronimo, so this is great news.

Oh, and Sun are planning to ship Derby, too. Naturally it is their own implementation, dubbed "Java DB".

The software scene gets more and more interesting.

Technorati tags: Apache IBM Geronimo Linux Java