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.
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