Yes, it’s that time again, time to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Fedora. A co-worker brought in the Fedora 11 DVD. I don’t like doing upgrades on my work box on company time (especially since I’m pushing by privileges by using Fedora at work), so brought the DVD home and started on the laptop here first. I was hoping for a quick install and then head over to work on my night off last night to do that one as well. That didn’t happen for multiple reasons.

I still don’t trust the built-in upgrader, so once again we backed everything up and went for a clean install. I started it around 8pm and didn’t finish the main install until about 2am. Now, part of that is that I found a ton of new packages that I want to play with, so the install took a lot longer than normal (little sister Brittany will be jealous to know Stellarium was one of those available in the default install). I would still like to see that sped up. However, I may also be running up against hardware issues. I think this laptop is now almost 6 years old. But aside from the install, with Fedora she runs pretty quick. I don’t care how great Windows 7 is (we’re not even going to talk about it predecessor) it will never run smoothly on this machine.

As usual, things just keep getting better and better. The only problem I’ve had so far was a popup warning about a lock on NFS. I think that was due to me transferring all my files (including the hidden ones) to this machine. But after a restart that too is gone. And all the Fedora 10 guides for getting your favourite extras worked just fine for 11. As usual I spent too much time last night playing with it.

Now I know Linux still isn’t for everyone, so for all you lucky son-of a-guns still on Windows, this is my tribute to you:

Software installation in Linux is difficult

Things are a bit slow at work so I’ve been messing with some of the scripts that the company offers easy installs for.  I’m increasingly disappointed with the ease of using Drupal. But Zenphoto is another matter. I played with it once a few months ago. I’ve always liked the clean look of it, but didn’t spend much time with it before due to the difficulty in just finding the admin login. My latest round with it has been much more promising.

First, for those having trouble the admin login is at http://domain.com/zenphoto/zp-core/ where domain.com is your domain, and zenphoto is changed to the folder you did the install on. In my case it’s http://prettyprettylights.com/art/zp-core/.

After login in the first thing we want to do is add some pictures. so we click on the upload tab. If we have an existing album we select it from the “Upload to” drop-down. If we don’t, then we type a new abum name in the field. Now for the best part. Click the box below it that says “Select Files.” Navigate to the folder with your pictures and select as many as you want. I’m sure there’s an upload limit either imposed by your php.ini, your hosting company, maybe even Zenphoto itself, but that’s not mentioned and I happily uploaded four photos at once.

Once the upload completed I was taken to a screen where I could scroll through and adjust the display settings. I can add descriptions, custom data, adjust the thumbnail size, adjust the part of the thumbnail that displays, all from a fairly easy, intuitive interface.

One thing I wasn’t liking was the multiple gallery setup. This is a little funny because I would love this sort of feature in just about any other Script, from blogging to CMS systems. But for Zenphoto I was at first content with the idea of doing a new install for every gallery I wanted. Then I came to my senses. It’s a great feature that just needs a little know-how, aka, friendly URLs. A little googling revealed that it was possible, but the documentation was a bit outdated and I hit a few road-blocks.

So, to get Friendly URLs working on Zenphoto 1.2.5:

• Go to the folder where you did the install on your web host.
• Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess.
• Open .htaccess so that you can make changes.
• Find the line that says “#### !!! Change this to the web path (eg: http://www.yourwebsite.com/photos –> /photos) !!!”
• Below that change it to the folder where you did the install, include a / at the beginning (ex. /art)
• Save the changes.
• Log into your Zenphoto admin area.
• Click on the Options Tab.
• Click on General.
• In URL Options check mod_rewrite.
• Test. Hopefully you won’t get a 404 error.

Since this discovery I may move this to a more generic images folder and see about using includes to plant the albums I want directly into my website where I want them. Part of the Zenphoto appeal is the clean interface on the default theme which should allow it to fit nicely into any standard theme. Maybe a few tweaks to the CSS to make fonts and margins a bit smaller. We’ll have to see how well that works out.

Fedora 9 Desktop

Back in 2003 I was starting to seriously get into Linux. I found myself in sink or swim when my old computer died and my new computer with Windows XP wouldn’t recognize the network card. At that time I installed Red Hat 9 (dual booted with the XP) thinking I had nothing to loose, and with no Internet and a broken backup, nothing better to do. Red Hat 9 not only installed smoothly, it picked up the Network Card that XP wouldn’t recognize. I’ve been a huge Red Hat fan ever since. But immediately following Red Hat 9 were the Fedora and Fedora Core Distros. For a long time, things were never quite the same. In fact, I still have Fedora Core 4 on that old server because of all the effort I put into getting it to run smoothly (not that I have ever done less with Windows). Tonight I installed Fedora 9 on my primary Laptop. The good days of Red Hat are back!

The initial install led me to believe that I would have to do some tweaking, as I’ve had to in the past, in order to get the wireless card working. I had to plug the laptop into the wired network in order to get a few extras during the install. It was also useful for setting up the NTP server and sending Red Hat my Hardware configuration. As one who usually uses older hardware, I want to encourage Red Hat to build in the best possible support for my machines. As soon as the install completed I went to see about setting up the wireless. It was already there! A quick connection to my network and we were downloading the latest updates. At the same time I plugged in my USB drive and started restoring my backups. Incidentally, Fedora 9 (and the Fedora 8 before this) recognize the 8GB Scandisk that I’ve been using without a hitch. For some reason my Mac won’t recognize it (I haven’t eliminated the possibility of a broken USB drive) and my XP laptop has to go through a long, involved, though mostly automated process before I can use it there.

The next step of course is to add a few things. I used Yum to quickly install Thunderbird, Wireshark, Ruby, and Filezilla for starts. We also customized the look and feel very nicely. It was then off to get the essential in Firefox Addons: Web Developer, Firebug, Yslow, Adblock Plus, Show IP,  the Clear Cache Button, All-in-One Sidebar. The Sidebar is on trial. I’m not sure it’s worth the reduced view-space. I then adjusted Firefox to never save passwords, always show the tab bar, and set http://www.google.com/linux as the start-up page.

Everything that bugged me about Fedora 8 is gone. I had some trouble with window borders when I turned on my desktop effects. No sign of that now. As much as I’ve hated Yum in the past, it’s working smoother than ever. When I installed the additional programs I guessed the name of most of them. No problem. They all installed beautifully.

The few grips that I have really have nothing to do with Fedora. I wish Gnome came with an auto Desktop Changer. I’ve been looking up a few alternative options online that look promising. And we may yet have another go at Emerald.

I also need to setup this little machine to play movies. As most Linux people probably know, the codecs for playing DVD are proprietary and often cost money. As such Fedora doesn’t include them by default. I’ll need to look up the free alternatives. That will come later today. My Mac Mini is still my first choice for movie playing anyway.

Finally there is the matter of upgrading between releases. I didn’t do that between Fedora 8 and Fedora 9. Things degenerated a bit towards the end with Fedora 8. But I’m quite optimistic about the eventual move from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10.

So, this means I shall be breaking down and buying and external DVD drive to plug into my Fedora 4 server. As smoothly as this has gone, I now have no qualms about updating that machine. Also, in hte past my first choice for newbies has been Ubuntu. I hate it with a passion, but it’s easy for those who don’t know what they’re doing. No more! As far as I’m concerned, Fedora is back on top. As such we will probably back up Kristen’s box tonight and move her over. Kristen is keen on this. Could be my own infectious enthusiasm.

My iPod Classic (pre-video) kicked the bucket recently. I love walking to the grocery store and anywhere else I can, but I like doing it with music. I’ve been compensating for a few weeks by either taking my whole laptop (no control over volume or fast forwarding), or my old, decrepit, touchy, barely working Discman. Still, the loss of my iPod had me appreciating the Discman, which I’ve had since, I was 12 or 13. And I’ve been missing my Walkman, the one I’ve had since I was 8, and eventually gave away, still in perfect working condition, to a roommate. The iPod lasted almost five years. However, the iPod always had problems. It stopped working about two or three years ago for a while, until a friend advised smacking it soundly. That worked. But not this time. Ultimately this seems to be a problem with the hard drive. You could hear it clicking and choking every time it had trouble.

So I had decided I wanted another iPod, but have been dubious about two things. First being price, second being it’s ability to last a while, especially given price. Costco is a great place to get them, it’s about the only place you can get any sort of discount on the price. They have Nanos, Classic Video iPods, and the Touch. My inclination was towards the Classic again, but while 80GB sounds great, I highly doubt that those have flash hard drives. I just don’t like the Nanos, even though they are nice and cheap (relatively). The major problem I have with the iPod Touch is that it is one step short of an iPhone. I’d love an iPhone if I could get a reasonable plan with it. But that’s right out. So I settled on getting a 8GB Touch, with much trepidation.

I’ve had only a few hours of sleep since.

I LOVE it! I love it too much. I got home, plugged it into my computer and went and took my shower. After getting out I went to check on it before climbing into bed. It was already done charging and had my music synced. I was having trouble finding my cell phone (aka alarm clock). So I looked and figured out how to use the alarm clock on the Touch. Then I needed to adjust the Time Zone. And add Portland. Set up weather. See if Safari really worked. Connect to my wireless network. Set up email. Send a message on Facebook. And OK, we’ll put on some music and finally go to sleep. Nice music interface, play with that a bit. And hey, direct link to YouTube so we’ll just watch some Muppets and Doctor Who shorts. I didn’t get much sleep today. The one thing that really bothered me is that I only got the 8GB. And it was about 70% full with my currently uploaded music. That doesn’t leave much room for movies, more music, and apps. I took the 8GB Touch back and splurged for the higher capacity model with 32GB. This thing is way too cool. I’m officially converted. This is enough to possibly derail my ambitions for the Nokia Treo 1973.

And now, just a few tidbits of the best Youtube and the Muppets have to offer:

Meh

Ode to Joy

Stars and Stripes FOREVER

Classical Chicken

Habanera

Danny Boy

I’ve never been much of a programmer, but I do decent enough writing and debugging PHP and Java, and I’ve recently fallen in love with Python. PHP has a huge fan base, so Googling for any problem usually has good results. Java has Java Doc, which makes it pretty darn easy to look up anything you need to do. Python was so easy to get started with that I wrote several of my Operating Systems assignments after only 4 chapters of reading, with 40 lines of code, versus my classmates who were averaging 250 lines of code.

And then there’s Ruby on Rails. I’ve been loath to try it. It seems over-hyped and largely used by people who can’t get their paths correct, much less properly use an MVC environment. But I’ve heard from several people how easy it was to use, and after trying out Cake PHP, I have been looking for a decent MVC environment. Initial assessment: Rails bites. Or is bytes? I’ve been messing with several online web tutorials. So far none of them are encouraging. I’ve seen several that help you create your first Hello World app, but don’t explain anything about it. My favorite, billed as the quickest possible way to get from install to Hello World:

alias rails_hello_world='rails hello && cd hello && ./script/generate controller welcome hello && echo "Hello World" > app/views/welcome/hello.html.erb && ./script/server -d && firefox 0.0.0.0:3000/welcome/hello'

And no explanation. Yeah, that’s useful. I’ve managed to get Rails running on my server, nice little Congrats screen and everything. Here’s the sad thing, when I look at Rails and the basic commands to get stuff set up, they make a lot of sense. But I’m really frustrated with the things that don’t make sense. For example, one aspect of the above code,

./script/generate controller welcome hello

When I initially ran a command along the lines of the above, I received a nice output that made a lot of sense considering the MVC framework. But I initally ran it with just one variable. And the tutorial I was going through at the time then provided a few lines of code and said, vioala, Hello World. Only that didn’t work. I’m pretty sure I need some view stuff first. So I went back to another tutorial which invoked multiple variables, like the above command, but with no explanation. I’m having a real hard time getting an idea of what is supposed to work, and why. Admittedly my frustration tolerance is a little low right now. And bad docs and tutorials does not make a bad language or environment. Sadest part is, I’m no good a documentation myself. So even if I do manage to get this all figured out, I don’t know that I’ll be able to do much better.

So anyone know of a good tutorial, preferably set in a Unix environment?

It’s that time again. Spring is gardening time. I’ve already bought seeds for herbs and veggies. I’m going to the hardware store today to pick up some flowers to dress up the porch. While I’m at it I think  I’ll pick up some wood. I’m determined to start a worm bin this year.

Graveyard shift has me interested in another project. Sleeping during the day has been tricky. The light coming in and the noise of the grounds keepers tends to wake me up. I’m sleeping longer during the day than I should be. On top of that the plants in my room are suffering from the lack of light since my blinds are closed during the day. I think I’ll move my  bed to the other end of my room. I want to build a sort of headboard to go with it. I want it to be wide enough to put my stereo on it so that I can play music to drown out the noise without playing it too loud. I’ll also hang some dark fabric from it to keep out the light so I can keep the blinds open for my plants.

My latest project is in action right now. I’m typing this post on my new OLPC laptop. I asked for one for Christmas and play time has finally started. It only just arrived. I’ve been quiet jealous of others who received theirs earlier, but it’s been worth the wait. It’s so small and light and cute! I might need to plug in a USB keyboard. I doubt this one is ergonomical. Still, I love it and I’m anxious to see what all it can do.

I noticed when I got home that I couldn’t play movies on my laptop. It’s running Fedora 8. I tried running Totem movie player. Got sound, but the screen was just blue. Blue screen of death for Linux I guess, only it didn’t take out my whole laptop. A little research suggested that my Compiz settings might be interfering. Compiz lets me do nifty desktop graphics like full transparency on my terminals and the workspace cube. Turning compiz off didn’t help. The following link got me started: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/16972. I ran gstreamer-properties in a terminal and went to the video tab. I then selected “X Window System (No Xv)” under “Default Output.” That didn’t work.

I then installed xine and gxine to see if it was just a Totem problem. That didn’t work either but it helped later. I changed my search to look for xine issues instead of Totem. From there I found a site that suggested opening the xine_config file. Most distros have this located in your home folder under .gnome2/Totem. In that file I ran a search for “video driver.” I changed the following lines:

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
#video.driver:auto

to

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
video.driver:xshm

After rebooting the computer I still wasn’t getting anywhere. But the following forum at least had a good clue to getting something working.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2859

The original poster noted that he could play movies if he had more than one player open at once. So I opened Totem and gxine and started both playing. Both brought up video. Now I can open just one and it works fine. Strange work-around, but video problem solved.

On the down side, my parents home computer is in really bad shape. I had it booting Knoppix and we had started some data backup. But now it won’t boot at all. Unless I figure out why and am able to fix it, that machine may be a lost cause. I should still be able to move the hard drives to another machine to recover the data.

Today my family’s primary computer stopped working. Starts to boot, then reboots with the option to start in Safe Mode. None of the safe modes are working. I called my dad and explained the problem. Something similar happened to his primary work computer a few years ago. He asked me if I could “Linux” it. I love that. When his work machine went down a few years ago I used a Knoppix CD to connect it to his network and pull all the data off. He’ll bring home that same CD tonight so that we can rescue the data from this machine. I do wish I could convince him to just let me put Linux on the machine. There is the possibility that a hard drive is acting up, but I doubt it. A nice Ubuntu distro could be styled to look like Windows. My mom wasn’t able to use the computer last night to view pictures on a CD. I brought them up without a hitch on my Fedora box.

It would be just my luck that when I have the best chance to convert the home family computer I leave all my best CDs at home. Linux just makes everything better.

Welcome to prettyprettylights.com. This page is largely here because I get a free domain with my new job. But I’ve been meaning to break into the blogosphere for a while now. Assuming I’m consistent with this the topics could range from technical to a standard journal entry. To kick off, this blog isn’t the only thing that’s finally up and running.

After over a month of being down my mythtv box is finally back up and running. Background: In mid-October my Dell GX240 Optiplex mini-tower blew a power supply. This was just prior to my changing it to Linux MCE. I had the Kubuntu DVD and had begun backing up my favorite programs. Now power supplies are expensive and I was being affected by the Novell layoffs at the time. So the machine has been dead until tonight.

Tuesday a new power supply that I ordered online arrived. However, ti was the wrong size, and didn’t have enough cables for my two hard drives and DVD-ROM. Happily, tonight was the BYU computer surplus sale. I picked up what I though was another GX240 that had been stripped of RAM and hard drives. All I needed was the power supply. But it’s a pain getting them out of these boxes. So I ended up moving the PCI cards and drives to the new box. The upside is that I was wrong. For $20 I picked up a GX270, with has more RAM slots and a faster processor. But the RAM from my GX 240 didn’t match up. A trip to CompUSA and I now have more RAM too (the old box came with 256MB, I picked up a 1GB stick)! Even better, after plugging everything in it booted right back up. No OS re-install! I made some adjustments to the date and time in the BIOS, and had a little trouble with the network card, but I’m back in action.

For reference, the box is running Debian Testing. In Gnome the network shows as being down. Clicking on my network icon brought up the following error: “SIOGIFFLAGS error: No such device.” I opened the network settings and set up eth1 with DHCP instead of a static IP. From there it looked like the card was up and running, but after restarting the network the icon still showed no connection. After some googling on another machine and running a few commands, like ifconfig -a , I noticed that I had an IP address and the settings looked fine. lspci and dmeseg showed no errors. I pinged google and got a response. Turns out the connection is working, but my icon isn’t reflecting this fact. I don’t know why. But for tonight, I’m happy. All I need at this point is a subscription to a TV Listing service and I’ll be good as new. I think I’ll wait a few days to try the Linux MCE install. End of semester is bad timing for big projects.

To finish off, this won’t be the permanent look for the site. But so far this is my favorite theme. I’ve been having trouble with Firefox’s Web Developer plugin. Wen I go to edit this page’s CSS I lose the CSS completely. Never had that one happen before. So expect changes.