Oops! Looks like I forgot to wish someone Happy Birthday. Well, that’s why they make Belated Birthday Cards.
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Category: Linux Stuff
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Happy Birthday OpenOffice.org
Happy 9th Birthday OpenOffice.org!
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Windows 7 Release Party
One of my best friends, Ron, who I’ve had the pleasure to work with for about 10 years in the IT field is having a Windows 7 Release party at his house. Since we both moved on to different companies, it’s been difficult to meet up with him. Ron is one of the best guys I know in IT. His skill set is strong, if he doesn’t know the answer to a problem, you can bet he will research it until he get a solution, and his customer service skills are second to none.
So I accepted his invitation to attend his Win 7 Release party. I asked Ron what he is going to demonstrate. Ron said, the multi-media features, how to navigate around the OS, hook up different devices, how to configure wireless, and answer questions. I asked if he will be able to show the updated BSOD and if I should bring a Linux USB or CD to help recover his PC.
I am looking forward to seeing the final product. I prefer Ubuntu and Mint 7, but I will need to be up to speed with Windows 7. It will only be a matter of time before the client migrates from Windows XP / Vista to a supported OS. All in all it should be a good time.
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Preview of Gnome 3.0
About 10 days ago I purchased a 16GB USB Flash Memory “jump drive” from New Egg. I bought the Corsair Flash Voyager with the rubber case. It is not the fastest drive out there – it is the fastest drive I’ve owned. Having 16GB of drive space is now allowing me to have some fun with people by showing them Linux booting and running from a USB memory stick.
The first distro I installed was Ubuntu 9.04. I used the USB Startup Disk Creator located under System -> Administration from the Menu Bar. You will need the Ubuntu 9.04 CD or the .iso file to load the system on the USB memory stick. Using the slider button I set the maximum storage space to save all my files. This will allow me to save documents, music, e-mail, web bookmarks, just about anything I want up to about 14GB. I can’t tell you how long it took becasue I had to step away for awhile to assist a client with a PC issue.
After installation was complete, I booted the USB drive off a test HP computer. Everything worked! Ubuntu detected all hardware on this PC, allowed me to connect to the Internet, use Terminal Server to connect to Windows 2008 servers, connect to my printers (HP LaserJet 4200 and HP OfficeJet Pro K550), and connect to the shares on my Linux and Windows PCs.
I changed the GDM Login to skip the autologin of LiveUser and created a new user account called george. I rebooted the PC and was able to logon as George to the Ubuntu instance as George. Using this account I connected to my printers, and changed the wallpaper to a Star Trek theme. Later that night I used the USB stick with my notebook to set up access to my home wireless network (worked with no problems connecting to my WPA2 network), G-mail on Thunderbird, and my HP Color LaserJet 2605 network printer. For the rest of the weekend, that was the PC I used.
Now I happen to have an iso of Linux Mint 7 and I wanted to try it out on the USB drive. I found a post on PenDriveLinux.com on how to install Linux Mint 7 onto a USB memory stick from within Windows. Instead of the 1GB persistence file, I chose the 4GB file. I partitioned the USB drive; 7GB for Mint 7, and 8GB for storage of downloads and other miscellaneous files. The 8GB partition is formatted to FAT32 so I can use it when I need to connect to Windows.
The green and dark grey / black colors look very nice. As stated above, I modified GDM to stop the auto login of the use mint, and created a user called george. I also like the Mint menu instead of the standard Gnome Menu Bar. If you prefer the Gnome Menu Bar, you can add it by right clicking the Panel bar and select Add to Panel.
I was able to enable the Compiz and customise it to my liking. I picked the option to have the spinning cube when I switch desktops, and picked Beam Up when I close the windows (looks cools with the Star Trek wallpaper.) I also installed Thunderbird 3 beta 4 and configured it with my G-mail account.
Most of the PCs I tested Mint 7 on worked well. I always found the ether-net cards and connect to the Internet. I like the fact every website I went to had working multi-media except for audio correctly. The sound is very faint.
Some things I find annoying:
- I can’t change the host name permanently (I renamed the PC rio-grande rebooted and the name stays mint.)
- Fortunes is always running every time I open Terminal. Some fortunes are funny, but now it is annoying.
I would like to try this bootable USB on some other PCs like Dell, Gateway, or a Macbook Pro. I would also like to figure out how to get Symantec ghost32.exe to work with Wine. The program works but doesn’t see the local hard drive. If I can make that work at the client site then I can move BartPE to a secondary tool.
I should also mention that I chose not to save any passwords incase I lose my USB stick. I configured Thunderbird not to save messages on the system, but I don’t think it is working correctly. I might look into enabling encryption on the home folder or see if I can
Although I have no plans on making this a permanent distro to use at work, I will give it great consideration when I rebuild my Dell Dimension 8200 after I purchase my new notebook.
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Rebuild Linux PCs at Work
Today is the Friday before Labor Day in the United States. Many of the employees of the client I support are off today. So I am taking this opportunity to rebuild my Fedora Core 11 PC (completed) and my Ubuntu 9.04 PC. I am also building a new Windows XP PC for R&D.
So far everything is going well.
Of course I backed up my Ubuntu PC using rsync to an external HDD. Since I decided to rework my partitions I also backed up the /home directory too. Everything is being built from scratch. Hopefully I can have everything finished by end of business today.
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Installed Fedora Core 11
A few days a go I downloaded installed Fedora Core 11 from DVD onto an HP D530 Desktop Tower.
- Intel Pentium D (dual processors) @ 3.4GHz
- 1 GB RAM (DDR2)
- 160 SATA HDD
- SATA CDROM
- Intel Video
- HP L1706 LCD
The installation went well. Both Gnome and KDE 4.3 are installed (I lke KDE 4.3 graphics but I still prefer Gnome) with almost every application available at initial setup. I also installed Samba Server (so I can host or share files) and the client so I can connect to Window shares and the Samba share on my Ubuntu PC.
After getting the system up and running, I immediately went to How to Forge and access the Perfect Fedora Gnome post. Once again falco’s directions were perfect. I followed every step – minus a few applications I didn’t want.
So now I started to customised my new FC 11 PC. I enabled Desktop Effects to see if by some chance I can have the spinning desktop cube and the wobble when I drag open windows. Amazingly enough I have them. Must be a fluke – better reboot to check. I have Desktop Effects!!! This is something I cannot enable on my Ubuntu PC at home (remember it’s 7.5 years old with an old NVIDIA GForece 2 card) and my Ubuntu PC at work. The only thing I can get with the Ubuntu work PC is wobble movement.
The first annoyance I ran into was the sudo command. Every time I used it I to install anything via command line, I received an error stating I am not listed in the sudoers file. So I searched the Internet and found out I need to run su –login -c ‘visudo’ to add my local account. OK – what are the commands for this program? Good luck finding out. If someone has them, drop me a line or let me know where to find them. So now getting sudo rights became a PINTA (Pain IN the Ass). To make a long story short – I ran su at the Terminal, ran nautilus to get to the sudoers file, change the permissions so root can write to it, ran gedit as root, found this line ## Allow root to run any commands anywhere added my local account with this line george ALL=(ALL) ALL, saved the file and closed gedit. I also had to reset the permissions back to Read Only. Finallyin terminal I entered sudo whoami received the correct response of root. Like I said PINTA.
I can access my Samba shares, my Windows shares, get to the Internet, run Pidgin, installed a HP LaserJet 4200 network printer, and installed a HP OfficeJet Pro K550 network printer.
However I need to install Terminal Server Client (tsclient) so I can RDC to the Microsoft servers I support. I know there are other applications that came with FC 11, but I am familiar with Terminal Server Client and I like it. Installation was easy – at the terminal window enter sudo yum install tsclient. After installation I created a connection to one of my Windows 2003 servers. Everything worked well and i can run the application just like I can on my Ubuntu PC and within Vista’s Remote Desktop Connection (RDC). A downside I experienced was the import option within tsclient – it would not allow me to import the connections I made on my Ubuntu PC. Possible bug or a incompatibility issue. When I get more time I might look into this.
I also wanted to install No Machine server and client on my FC 11 PC. Just save the RPM files to a download folder and run Package Installer in the following order:
- nxclient
- nxnode
- nxserver
Time to test. I was able to establish a connection to my Ubuntu PC with no problems. Worked just like it’s suppose to. I then created a server / host connection on my FC 11 PC. For some reason I was not able to connect. Of course the error was cryptic and told me to check the var/log/messages file on my host PC. Even more cryptic was the log file, but I Googled the error and found several posts in the Fedora wiki regarding issues with NX Server. Turn out the problem is with the host file. You need to add you computer name on the first line example would be pcdev68.domain name. Now I can connect from my Ubutnu and two Vista PCs to my FC 11 PC from anywhere on the network.
Since I’m not planning on using KDE 4.3 and I got the OK to wipe out the Windows partition on the PC, I might spend some time within the next week or so and rebuild the PC. Of course I’ll copy off that sudoers file and some of the other configurations I made first.
So far I like FC 11. When I ran FC 2 and FC 3 way back when, I was new to Linux and found some thing to be difficult. And to be honest some thing are still difficult. I think using openSUSE 9.x – 11.1 and Ubuntu 8.04 – 9.04 gave me a stonger background into Linux. I don’t consider myself to be a complete noob, but I have much to learn before I would even consider myself an expert. Maybe I should look into a certified Linux Professional course and exam.
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Microsoft Contributes to Linux Kernel
I wonder, with Microsoft‘s contribution to the Linux kernel, will I get to experience BSOD in Ubuntu? One of the reasons I moved to Linux was to get away from Microsoft. Microsoft products are a fine choice for some people, and heck I like Microsoft Office on Windows XP, but I wonder what the ramifications will be now they have 20,000 lines of code in the kernel. Today it is device drivers to allow Linux to run as a virtual machine on top of Hyper-V environment (Microsoft’s hypervisor and implementation of virtualization), tomorrow a new Microsoft Linux distro which will crash constantly, require anti-malware software , and one that will allow attackers to exploit a security hole in ActiveX.
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Drahusz 