The fglrx driver for ATI graphics cards has finally been made available for Intrepid, so I gave it a shot on my Inspiron 1501. On the whole, it's a lot faster and smoother than the open source radeon driver and doesn't leave you with the ugly but momentary artifacts on the screen. Nice.
Unfortunately though it breaks suspend and hibernate, so until ATI can work out the bugs, I'll just have to slog along with the open source driver.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Intrepid Updates
I guess it's time for an update on how Ubuntu Intrepid is going on my Dell Inspiron 1501. Well, pretty good actually.
Suspend and Hibernate are working again (mostly) and if things don't wake up properly from hibernate, it goes into a normal startup sequence when moving up to runlevel 5. Could be a little neater on initiating hibernate or suspend, but all in all, it works.
OpenOffice 3.0 unfortunately will not be released as a standard part of Intrepid. That kinda sucks, but the very kind people at Ubuntu have made it available, patched, as a backport.
Just add:
to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, reload you package lists in Synaptic and hit 'Mark all Upgrades'. Apply. That should upgrade OpenOffice from 2.4 to 3.0 and upgrade any other stuff in need as well.
I do have one gripe with OO3 in Intrepid and that is that I don't seem to be able to install extensions. Have logged a fault report here.
The instabilities with compiz I had earlier seem to have been resolved. No problems at the moment.
Tried installing googleearth. Well, what can I say. I just don't think the ATI driver is up to it. Need to do some more research, but it's pretty much a useless app at the moment.
I installed VMware Workstation (ok, I couldn't find anything to get the photos off my basic Nokia 6070 and needed the Microphylic PC Suite - which didn't work anyway!) Had to use the latest version (Workstation 6.5) to be able to build vmmon against the 2.6.27 kernel, as previous versions don't support it. (Building vmmon is part of the configuration part of installation.)
One oddity. This is the first time that I have come across a .bundle file. I didn't like the look of it and downloaded the .rpm instead to install with alien, but found that the rpm is just a wrapper for the same .bundle file. In the end I found out just to execute it. It's only the installation package and does not need un-archiving or a package manager.
That's about it. Overall I'm pretty happy with Intrepid. It's going to be a top release.
dov
Suspend and Hibernate are working again (mostly) and if things don't wake up properly from hibernate, it goes into a normal startup sequence when moving up to runlevel 5. Could be a little neater on initiating hibernate or suspend, but all in all, it works.
OpenOffice 3.0 unfortunately will not be released as a standard part of Intrepid. That kinda sucks, but the very kind people at Ubuntu have made it available, patched, as a backport.
Just add:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main
to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, reload you package lists in Synaptic and hit 'Mark all Upgrades'. Apply. That should upgrade OpenOffice from 2.4 to 3.0 and upgrade any other stuff in need as well.
I do have one gripe with OO3 in Intrepid and that is that I don't seem to be able to install extensions. Have logged a fault report here.
The instabilities with compiz I had earlier seem to have been resolved. No problems at the moment.
Tried installing googleearth. Well, what can I say. I just don't think the ATI driver is up to it. Need to do some more research, but it's pretty much a useless app at the moment.
I installed VMware Workstation (ok, I couldn't find anything to get the photos off my basic Nokia 6070 and needed the Microphylic PC Suite - which didn't work anyway!) Had to use the latest version (Workstation 6.5) to be able to build vmmon against the 2.6.27 kernel, as previous versions don't support it. (Building vmmon is part of the configuration part of installation.)
One oddity. This is the first time that I have come across a .bundle file. I didn't like the look of it and downloaded the .rpm instead to install with alien, but found that the rpm is just a wrapper for the same .bundle file. In the end I found out just to execute it. It's only the installation package and does not need un-archiving or a package manager.
That's about it. Overall I'm pretty happy with Intrepid. It's going to be a top release.
dov
Saturday, October 18, 2008
A Very Practical God
The other morning I was deep in prayer while at work. It's physical work and wasn't anything intellectually demanding, so I was praying silently and sometimes in tongues with my lips. At one point I (silently) cried out to God, "Lord, help me to serve you better!" Straightaway He answered me. I don't think even a second passed between the call and His response. He said this. "Get to bed on time."
Wow. That could not have been me. I've been burning the candle at both ends - and burning out at the middle for so long that I don't know any other way of being. My younger brother was chiding me yesterday for not resting enough, he thinks, when I'm ill, "You do know what rest is, don't you?"
Sometimes we look so much for the spiritual sounding or feeling solution when we have not looked after the basics of our own physical or spiritual needs. Either that, or we strive so hard to serve the Lord and His people that we miss the mark by not following our Maker's instructions. The only replacement for sleep that I know of is prayer and sometimes we are called to that. Great men like John Hyde, missionary to India as well as unknown people are often called to this, but even then it can take a toll on their bodies. (In John Hyde's case, prolonged agonized prayer and fasting led to his heart -reportedly- physically moving across his chest and his falling asleep in the Lord at the early age of 47.) The rest of us need to discipline ourselves to rest. We are made of flesh and soul and spirit (yes, I hold to the trichotomous view) and even in the resurrection we will have body, soul and spirit. We should not forget one in favour of another unless led to.
Oh, He gave me a bed-time of 2300hrs.
Wow. That could not have been me. I've been burning the candle at both ends - and burning out at the middle for so long that I don't know any other way of being. My younger brother was chiding me yesterday for not resting enough, he thinks, when I'm ill, "You do know what rest is, don't you?"
Sometimes we look so much for the spiritual sounding or feeling solution when we have not looked after the basics of our own physical or spiritual needs. Either that, or we strive so hard to serve the Lord and His people that we miss the mark by not following our Maker's instructions. The only replacement for sleep that I know of is prayer and sometimes we are called to that. Great men like John Hyde, missionary to India as well as unknown people are often called to this, but even then it can take a toll on their bodies. (In John Hyde's case, prolonged agonized prayer and fasting led to his heart -reportedly- physically moving across his chest and his falling asleep in the Lord at the early age of 47.) The rest of us need to discipline ourselves to rest. We are made of flesh and soul and spirit (yes, I hold to the trichotomous view) and even in the resurrection we will have body, soul and spirit. We should not forget one in favour of another unless led to.
Oh, He gave me a bed-time of 2300hrs.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Another product review...
Telstra, or Telecom Australia as it used to be called, seems to have been distributing Motorola Surfboard modems to a lot of it's new broadband cable customers and I've had the opportunity to use a few of them. My experiences have unfortunately been more in the troubleshooting range rather than 'sit back and enjoy' however.
On the positive, these modems are indeed simple enough to set up and they work within their parameters, most of the time anyway. They do however have some distinct problems.
The adventure started with my mate's new iBook. He wanted to connect it via ethernet, so he unplugged the ethernet cable from the back of the pc, plugged it into the iBook and voila! Nothing. We tried with a new profile. No go. Pulled my hair out for ages before turning off the modem at the power source and leaving it for 5 minutes did the trick. The modems have a habit of 'marrying' themselves to their current pc and won't detect a new connection. Just cost cutting I presume. The non-wifi models do not seem to have any web-interface either, so configuration of any sort is a no-go.
My second adventure with one of these modems was with a Motorola SBG900. Wifi router-ethernet-modem all in one.
This problem confused me for a long time. I reset the admin password for a bit of security, but found after a while that I could no longer log in. I thought I'd forgotten the password, but then read a forum post saying that it forgets passwords and will refuse any password after that. True enough, I manually reset it to factory settings and reset the password. Then the modem forgot that password. It seems to only remember it's password as long as it is the default password, 'motorolla'. Great. Either allow anyone who can hack the wifi access to re-configure the modem, or set everything up with static ip addresses and limited wifi access etc, reset the password, kiss access goodbye as it forgets the password and wait til someone in the house needs to connect a new PSP or laptop before a good old factory reset and doing it all again...
In conclusion? Unless all you want to do is connect one PC and leave it forever, go to MSY and buy your own modem/router if your ISP of choice is only offering these modems. They are not worth the trouble.
On the positive, these modems are indeed simple enough to set up and they work within their parameters, most of the time anyway. They do however have some distinct problems.
The adventure started with my mate's new iBook. He wanted to connect it via ethernet, so he unplugged the ethernet cable from the back of the pc, plugged it into the iBook and voila! Nothing. We tried with a new profile. No go. Pulled my hair out for ages before turning off the modem at the power source and leaving it for 5 minutes did the trick. The modems have a habit of 'marrying' themselves to their current pc and won't detect a new connection. Just cost cutting I presume. The non-wifi models do not seem to have any web-interface either, so configuration of any sort is a no-go.
My second adventure with one of these modems was with a Motorola SBG900. Wifi router-ethernet-modem all in one.
This problem confused me for a long time. I reset the admin password for a bit of security, but found after a while that I could no longer log in. I thought I'd forgotten the password, but then read a forum post saying that it forgets passwords and will refuse any password after that. True enough, I manually reset it to factory settings and reset the password. Then the modem forgot that password. It seems to only remember it's password as long as it is the default password, 'motorolla'. Great. Either allow anyone who can hack the wifi access to re-configure the modem, or set everything up with static ip addresses and limited wifi access etc, reset the password, kiss access goodbye as it forgets the password and wait til someone in the house needs to connect a new PSP or laptop before a good old factory reset and doing it all again...
In conclusion? Unless all you want to do is connect one PC and leave it forever, go to MSY and buy your own modem/router if your ISP of choice is only offering these modems. They are not worth the trouble.
Monday, September 29, 2008
When will I learn?
There it was. Useful. Versatile. Almost Spartan in utilitarian beauty, and just what I'd been looking for. A USB to IDE and SATA adapter. No housing, as I said it was kinda Spartan, but it had an external connector that jumbled SATA and IDE (inc. floppy) all onto one multi-headed device. Perfect for file backups and troubleshooting on the run.
Only one catch... The brand was Ritmo. Now, call this a product review if you will. It is not intended to be slanderous in any way, just honest. I normally have a 'Don't buy Ritmo' rule, for no other reason but that I have never had a Ritmo product last much longer than the time it takes me to lose the receipt (not long). Anyway, I bought it. It's called the R-driver. It lasted for maybe 3 uses, then the power supply died. Just when I needed it... Another memorable Ritmo disaster was the KVM box I bought for my Dad. From the colour output on the monitor, you'd think they'd changed colour for Autumn. That was embarrassing. I like to give my parents my best. They gave me theirs!
In conclusion, there are many cheap Asian brands out there for electronics. Some are great. I love the Wise router my Dad and myself use for example. Some stuff is really rotten though and Ritmo is a brand I'll be staying clear of.
Only one catch... The brand was Ritmo. Now, call this a product review if you will. It is not intended to be slanderous in any way, just honest. I normally have a 'Don't buy Ritmo' rule, for no other reason but that I have never had a Ritmo product last much longer than the time it takes me to lose the receipt (not long). Anyway, I bought it. It's called the R-driver. It lasted for maybe 3 uses, then the power supply died. Just when I needed it... Another memorable Ritmo disaster was the KVM box I bought for my Dad. From the colour output on the monitor, you'd think they'd changed colour for Autumn. That was embarrassing. I like to give my parents my best. They gave me theirs!
In conclusion, there are many cheap Asian brands out there for electronics. Some are great. I love the Wise router my Dad and myself use for example. Some stuff is really rotten though and Ritmo is a brand I'll be staying clear of.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
The True Nature of Sin
It seems that God has challenged me lately about sin. One sin in particular that I had let stay, but sin in general also. The challenge goes something like this...
Jesus said, that those who love Him will obey His commandments. There would seem to be the logical conclusion there that we will obey what we love. Therefore, if we obey a desire or urge or call which is contrary to what Jesus has commanded us, then we love that thing more than we love Jesus and as Leonard Ravenhill would say, "Anything you love more than Jesus is an idol".
When we exalt our own desires and directions over God's will, we crown ourselves and our will an idol before God. When we follow the desires of our flesh, we crown our bodies an idol before Him and when we chase material things, regardless of what they may be, instead of sacrificing our desire of these things to Him and giving it all into His possession and rule, we make images of money, cars or houses that we bow down to instead of to Him.
God, help us to love you always, not just as a friend and a saviour, but the Lord of every second, every desire and every breath that we hold.
Amen.
Jesus said, that those who love Him will obey His commandments. There would seem to be the logical conclusion there that we will obey what we love. Therefore, if we obey a desire or urge or call which is contrary to what Jesus has commanded us, then we love that thing more than we love Jesus and as Leonard Ravenhill would say, "Anything you love more than Jesus is an idol".
When we exalt our own desires and directions over God's will, we crown ourselves and our will an idol before God. When we follow the desires of our flesh, we crown our bodies an idol before Him and when we chase material things, regardless of what they may be, instead of sacrificing our desire of these things to Him and giving it all into His possession and rule, we make images of money, cars or houses that we bow down to instead of to Him.
God, help us to love you always, not just as a friend and a saviour, but the Lord of every second, every desire and every breath that we hold.
Amen.
Getting the Whole Story
My attention was drawn by a friend yesterday back to the book of Romans. He was shocked by a mis-reading of his in ch 4. He had thought that vs 15 said that law brings death, but blanched a bit when he realized that is says that the law brings wrath! On considering this a moment, I was suddenly confronted by the idea that my friend, being a good pentecostal boy and raised in a pentecostal church, might have no idea what the law actually means. So often do we, as pentecostals, throw away the Old Testament, not realizing that our understanding of the New Testament, the Covenant we hold on to by faith which is sealed with Jesus Christ's own blood, is greatly diminished as a consequence.
Myself, raised a traditional Lutheran with Sola Scriptura ringing soundly in my ears am a little better off, but it was not until entering Bible College that I grew to understand the Law and Grace more fully.
I love the book of Romans. This epistle of Paul's, along with Galatians, is the deepest and most detailed laying out of the Gospel that we have. Not only does it go into salvation and the maintenance of salvation, but the amazing Grace of our God who not only forgives us of our sin, but changes us and strengthens those who walk in His Spirit to live a holy life overcoming our sin! Seriously I love it, but would not comprehend it if I had not studied the Old Testament and the Law also. My challenge to any readers that may happen to come along is this. When we read the Word, do we read the whole of the Word that the Lord has supplied us with? Do we think that we are so far out of the jungle, so to speak, that we do not need to study the whole of God's specific revelation of Himself and His ways that He has preserved in the Bibles we so casually peruse?
Myself, raised a traditional Lutheran with Sola Scriptura ringing soundly in my ears am a little better off, but it was not until entering Bible College that I grew to understand the Law and Grace more fully.
I love the book of Romans. This epistle of Paul's, along with Galatians, is the deepest and most detailed laying out of the Gospel that we have. Not only does it go into salvation and the maintenance of salvation, but the amazing Grace of our God who not only forgives us of our sin, but changes us and strengthens those who walk in His Spirit to live a holy life overcoming our sin! Seriously I love it, but would not comprehend it if I had not studied the Old Testament and the Law also. My challenge to any readers that may happen to come along is this. When we read the Word, do we read the whole of the Word that the Lord has supplied us with? Do we think that we are so far out of the jungle, so to speak, that we do not need to study the whole of God's specific revelation of Himself and His ways that He has preserved in the Bibles we so casually peruse?
The Morning After
Hmmm. Maybe I was a bit rash in installing Intrepid so soon... I only have two major complaints. One really. The problem is this. None of the things I actually installed Intrepid for seem to work properly anymore, or in some cases at all, except for the tabs in Nautilus. As I'm not doing any coding at the moment, I'm not really needing them that much anyway.
Suspend and Hibernate are still no-go. The package in my bug report has been changed to acpi-support, but no progress that I know of yet. No comments etc except for my own. Network Manager is also playing up a fair bit. I don't have to kill the process anymore to get it working again, but it won't store a WEP key in the Password Manager, with the result that the key needs to be supplied every time you log in and sometimes several times again after that! Sometimes it will duplicate the wifi profile as well and then refuse to log in at all, no matter how many times you supply the key. The solution I came upon for the duplication issue is to delete all copies of the wifi profile. One correct profile will then 'appear' with the old settings intact. Alas, no WEP key. Afer reading the bug reports, I still can't seem to make out whether it's a Network Manager issue or Password Manager fouling things up.
Suspend and Hibernate are still no-go. The package in my bug report has been changed to acpi-support, but no progress that I know of yet. No comments etc except for my own. Network Manager is also playing up a fair bit. I don't have to kill the process anymore to get it working again, but it won't store a WEP key in the Password Manager, with the result that the key needs to be supplied every time you log in and sometimes several times again after that! Sometimes it will duplicate the wifi profile as well and then refuse to log in at all, no matter how many times you supply the key. The solution I came upon for the duplication issue is to delete all copies of the wifi profile. One correct profile will then 'appear' with the old settings intact. Alas, no WEP key. Afer reading the bug reports, I still can't seem to make out whether it's a Network Manager issue or Password Manager fouling things up.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Installed Intrepid Ibex Alpha 6 on my Inspiron 1501
Just installed Intrepid on my dell. Started out as just a test install in an extra partition, but I liked it so much, I replaced Hardy with it.
The main points in Intrepid's favour were: suspend and hibernate worked great (please note past tense), the improvements in the Network Manager which mean I can now use it for wifi without crashing things and tabs in Nautilus.
The system is still a little bit of a jumble, as you'd expect from an Alpha, but seems steady enough to use as my main OS.
Suspend and hibernate were working on the initial installation using kernel 2.6.27-3, but is no longer working due to a suspected regression in 2.6.27-4. There also seems to be a driver issue of some sort. See my bug report on launchpad.
Network manager is advancing at a great rate. Mark Shuttleworth's ambition or having constant internet wherever and whenever is looking like becoming a reality. This is also the first time that I have been able to use Network Manager to connect to wifi without crashing things. No more wifi-radar! One issue with the wifi on the 1501 was that the drivers would not install through apt or the Hardware Drivers manager. I installed the windows driver using ndiswrapper and the guide here.
Finally to tabs in Nautilus. Gotta love it. I had a long convo with the Nautilus developers in Aug 2007 about tab support and was told pretty much that it would happen when hell freezes over, that I could write my own code if I wanted, but I wouldn't get any help and it wouldn't be implemented anyway. Great. I used pcmanfm instead. Well, I don't see any ice creeping up from the deeps and I'm using tabs in Nautilus. Seriously though, a big well-done to the Nautilus developers. They put in a lot of work and it's a great feature.
That's all for now. Back to the essay I'm supposed to be doing...
The main points in Intrepid's favour were: suspend and hibernate worked great (please note past tense), the improvements in the Network Manager which mean I can now use it for wifi without crashing things and tabs in Nautilus.
The system is still a little bit of a jumble, as you'd expect from an Alpha, but seems steady enough to use as my main OS.
Suspend and hibernate were working on the initial installation using kernel 2.6.27-3, but is no longer working due to a suspected regression in 2.6.27-4. There also seems to be a driver issue of some sort. See my bug report on launchpad.
Network manager is advancing at a great rate. Mark Shuttleworth's ambition or having constant internet wherever and whenever is looking like becoming a reality. This is also the first time that I have been able to use Network Manager to connect to wifi without crashing things. No more wifi-radar! One issue with the wifi on the 1501 was that the drivers would not install through apt or the Hardware Drivers manager. I installed the windows driver using ndiswrapper and the guide here.
Finally to tabs in Nautilus. Gotta love it. I had a long convo with the Nautilus developers in Aug 2007 about tab support and was told pretty much that it would happen when hell freezes over, that I could write my own code if I wanted, but I wouldn't get any help and it wouldn't be implemented anyway. Great. I used pcmanfm instead. Well, I don't see any ice creeping up from the deeps and I'm using tabs in Nautilus. Seriously though, a big well-done to the Nautilus developers. They put in a lot of work and it's a great feature.
That's all for now. Back to the essay I'm supposed to be doing...
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