Category: Free Software

Articles about Free Software.

Something is horribly b0rked

Db0

And I don’t have time to fix it now. A bit later. Please hold on

Update: Fixed – Phew.

I think that I will not use the AskApache plugin. Even though it looks very useful (especially since I’ve been mildly hacked once) it managed to b0rk the site twice (although I will admit that the first time it was my fault as well).

However the fact that it is so easy to break your site, even if you have some passing knowledge of web administration like me, makes it a bit dangerous for the faint of heart.

Another problem is that I couldn’t even leave a comment at the plugin’s page due to the heavy spam filtering or whatever. This is especially exasperating when your site is freaking up (not finding the admin pages and whatnot) and you’d like some support. Fortunately I managed to search for keywords and find a comment left by the author of the plugin advising how to fix my problem.

Very big Note: When the author talks about the .htaccess file. He means the .htaccess in the wp-admin/ folder not the one in your domain root. Do not touch the one in the root! I learned that the hard (or rather, the run around in panic, waving my hands around) way,

Thrice's the charm

Db0

I have finally took the time to upgrade my Girlfriend’s laptop (Dell Inspiron 6400) to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) from Gusty Gibbon. It took me a while to get around to it as I never seemed to be able to get to her place with any decent amount of time to allow me to do it.

The reason why I needed to upgrade, other than being bleeding edge, is so that I could finally sort out a bunch of problems I introduced in my attempts to get the ATI drivers to work normally.

Initially, I tried the automatic upgrade feature of the updates-manager, just for the hell of it, although I pretty much expected it not to fix my current issues. It worked flawlessly. Indeed, from my previous attempts at distro-upgrade, I expected the thing to horribly b0rk out but I was pleasantly surprised.

Unfortunately, the problems that I was having were not resolved by the upgrade so I went to plan 2. A complete reinstallation with my new shiny RW CD I just burned.

Once again, everything worked amazingly well and within 30 minutes I had a fresh warking installation. I am especially happy that they finally decided to include an option on the CD boot for Installing directly and I didn’t have to get into the live environment before I could do it.

Now I had to see if setting up the laptop would be problematic. Fortunately it wasn’t. This time I also went for the smart method and just used EnvyNG to download and install the ATI drivers which worked (again) flawlessly and quickly.

Fortunately, other than setting up the language and reinstalling the previous software, I did not have to do any extra configuration on my gf profile. This is the bonus you get when you have the /home directory in a different partition as all the program settings are kept there. It wasn’t so easy with my own (second) profile since when I tried to recreate the user, for some reason, the system would not let me use a directory that already existed on the system. That meant that I had to use a different dir for the user and move my necessary program settings there (.mozila for firefox, .purple for pidgin etc. It always annoys me when programs do not have the same config directory as their name…). This wasn’t such a big issue to tell the truth as my previous profile was quite b0rked from previous experimentations.

I was also happy to see that Laptop Suspension actually worked now. Unfortunately Hibernation still does not. It just starts the procedure and then returns you to the locked user screen. Maybe it’s some x11 setting I need to find…

Last issue for the day was Firefox refusal to play flash sound while another program (like amarok) was using the sound channel. Fortunately a little googling led me to the quick solution.

Well, that’s all for today. The setup was quite painless so I don’t have much to rant about. The next days will show how true that is. Hopefully, by the time the next version arrives I will not need any more reinstallations and the auto-upgrade feature should be enough. Of course, that depens on how much I experiment again. 😀

Damnit, gimme my extensions back!

Db0

I am wondering when are my Firefox extensions finally going to be ported to Firefox 3. Currently the recent version of my favorite browser is just so much better to use that it truly annoys me to have to make a choice between either my extensions or a faster, sleeker, sexier experience.

Yes, I can force the extensions to work but too many of them just can’t handle the awsomeness of it 🙁

So please, dear developers of firefox 2 plugins, get around to making them work with fx3. Don’t leave us hanging until after the beta versions and beyond…

No OpenID for you

Db01 Comment

I’ve given up trying to make the WP-OpenID plugin work with my theme. It seems it just doesn’t want to. Watever I do, it either tries to always authenticate on the url (even if it isn’t a provider) or never. I can’t get to it actually check the site.

Also, even if I do use a url that provides openid auth, the comment is rejected as spam (probably by bcspamblock) and I can’t be bollocksed to troubleshoot that.

So for now, unfortunately, I’m disabling OpenID functionality on this site. Let’s hope this can be fixed in the future.

My 3Dyssey

Db0

I have finally managed to make the display drivers on my girlfriend’s laptop (Dell Inspiron 6400) work with the propriertary ATI drivers.

It took me about a week and a lot of research but I finally managed to make it work. To make a long story short, the problem was that before I tried to install the propriertary drivers, I had installed the xserver-xgl package as it is necessary to have 3d acceleration with Ubuntu’s restricted drivers. Unfortunately, as the propriertary drivers can finally work with AIGLX, XGL is not needed anymore. Also unfortunately, this is not mentioned anywhere and not are you warned about it at all. As a result, I didn’t even think of that this might be the cause.

Furthemore, the ATI installation wiki, does not even mention this in the verification section either. I have now added it just to save other the same frustration I went through.

Hopefully, once I uninstalled the xserver-xgl driver, ATI became the default renderer. Unfortunately since compiz is used to work with XGL, it refused to activate. Fortunately the envy script is setup to configure compiz to use AIGLX so all I needed to do to fix this was run the script and have it reinstall the ATI drivers.

Finally I have normal 2D and 3D Capabilities. I especially hated not being able to see a fullscreen movie.

Lesson for the future learned: Ignore manual installations and just run the goddamn Envy

Now, all I need to do is figure out why power management is not working :-/

I think Ubuntu has spoiled me.

Db01 Comment

For the last day or so I’ve been trying to setup Fedora 8 just to see the progress that has been done there. For those who haven’t checked the history on this blog (i.e. everyone),Fedora Core 1 was pretty much the first distro that I tried as my first serious foray into this wonderful world. So I have always a soft spot for it.

So after I played around with Mint and KDE 4 (Nice btw), I chucked in my freshly burnt DVD and started the installation. To tell the truth, I liked that fact that I didn’t have to wait for a LiveCD environment to load before I started the installation process. I also took notes of what I did and what problems I had in order to write my experience. In order of happening:

  • Install Fedora with Basic Packages and Developments Packages
  • Login with root (As the system did not prompt me to create a user during the installation process which is strange. I may have missed something but I don’t think so).
  • User System -> Adminstration -> Users & Groups to create a normal user
  • Discover that he is not a member of any group. Add him to some basic ones
  • Try to setup sudo for more security. run visudo and uncomment the option to allow users of the “wheel” group to run all commands. Add the new user to the wheel group
  • Run pppoe-setup to set up my dsl connection. Setup more difficult than pppoeconf which took most of the correct choices. Internet connection working now
  • Start copying user configurations to a folder in the /home directory called my_clones. Then give everyone permissions to a new group called “clones”, grant all files in that folder with r/w perms for the “clones” group and then link then configuration files to each user’s directory.
  • Discover that Amarok doesn’t like that for some reason. Discover the “amarokrc” in the .kde/share/config directory. Link that as well. Collection still not saved. Rebuild it. Curse kde for not needing ownership of configuration files.
  • Try to install proprietary Nvidia drivers. Initially follow instructions here
  • Try to play some music while waiting for some permissions to change. Discover that Fedora still does not have mp3 support out of the box and no easy way to have it (like amarok informing you to press a button). Sigh and play my personal last.fm radio from firefox 3 beta 4
  • Install a bunch of packages that I hope will provide me with mp3 playback. Those include amarok-extras-nonfree.
  • Try to install d3lphin and got it without any icons. Unusable. Tried to find out what I was missing and thus installed some kd4 packages. As a result it started installing various things I did not need. In the end I had to reinstall among others VLC, Amarok, and the Gimp ad the KDE packages seem to have some weird dependencies…D3lphin still not working
  • Installed Gnucash. It didn’t automatically recognize the configuration files. Fortunately all I had to do was open the ledger file.
  • Tried to install Keytouch. Not in Fedora Repositories. Downloaded RPM for fedora 7 and installed. My Play, Back and Forward buttons do not work although they do in Ubuntu.
  • Tried to find the advanced compiz manager. Couldn’t. Installed some packages that I seemed appropriate, including emerald but manager didn’t appear and emerald didn’t affect the window decorations. Still haven’t found which package install’s compiz advanced setting manager…
  • Trying to adjust the time. Got error: “Failed to locate a program for configuring the date and time. Perhaps none is installed?” – Huh?!
  • Wine worked fortunately but I’ve lost my menu items.
  • For some reason, on boot, Fedora seems to get stuck on the boot sequence while trying to get an IP for my eth0 device. As I’m not using DHCP but rather I’m using pppoe to connect online, this just slows down the booting for no reason.
  • I’ve lost access to my previous installations of Ubuntu and Mint. Well, I’ve lost my previous grub configuration from Mint when Fedora set up the MBR and it’s own grub. I had lost Ubuntu access when Mint formated the /boot sector as a prequisite for using it (I have my /boot on a separate partition) and that pissed my off but I was hoping that Fedora would recognise my other Distro installations and give me options to boot on them. Unfortunately, even though it recognised my old WinXp installation and created an option for it, it did not recognise the GNU/Linux ones. I tried to make manual menus but apparently this only created grub boot sequences fit for Windows. This actually still annoys me. How come different distros can recognise your windows installation but are plainly oblivious to your other GNU/Linux installations? For that matter, why does Ubuntu derivatives insist on formatting your /boot partition before using it? Can’t they just leave it well enough alone?

Anyway, enough ranting. I did manage to make Fedora work partially as I need it but I’m still missing my super custom compiz-fusion eye candy and I’ve lost some settings in the process. Unfortunately I didn’t want to use my previous user directory since different distros have different ways of organizing it and every time I tried to do this, I ended up with a bunch of errors on loading it which were the result of different configuration items.

Unfortunately, my experience with Setting up Fedora 8 is not as good as I’d hoped. Ubuntu is just miles ahead in regards to ease of use.There is no way that a simple user can setup a Linux installation with Fedora with the same ease that you can do in Ubuntu. And this is unfortunate. I just hope the devs take some points on the way that Ubuntu handles the initial configuration and the available menus and copy the useful items.

Nevertheless, I plan to stick with Fedora 8 for a while just to see how well I can use it. Unfortunately I’d like to be able to multi-boot into my other installations but I still have to work on my grub’s menu.lst in order to make it see them.

New

Db0

New AmarokHoly mama!

The new amaroK is coming out and the new stable of Wesnoth is out already.

Specifically, the new amaroK looks amazingly sweet. If anyone thought that it was not a killer app. before, they certainly cannot keep this belief anymore, and since it should be able to run under windows as well, this will probably blow all the competition out of the water.

I still cannot believe how cool the GUI has become 😮

Wesnoth 1.4 also brings a host of updates to the table. Although anyone who’s played the development tree (1.3) has seen them already, they are still a huge improvement over the last stable (1.2.8). If you tried out Wesnoth only about a year ago (or only with the stable) I strongly suggest you take a second look now 😉

Lawful Evil

Db01 Comment

I have now seen the true face of Corporate Ethics first hand.

See how low the music recording cartel industry and their cronies will go to attack file sharing networks. They have now added domain stealing as well as licence and trademark abuse to their wonderful repertoire of threats, cracking, brainwash and extortion.

There is simply no limit to their immorality; and the latest case is just a wonderful example of how rabidly they are fighting against their inenvitable demise (which they have brought down upon themselves). It’s like the thrashing of a cornered beast. Now that they have decided to shit all over the GPL however, is where I draw the line.

Not only did they threaten an innocent person (the domain holder) with legal action in order to get him to pass the domain name to them. Not only did they subtly modify the site in order to trick regular users to please their corporate masters. Not only are they now giving away a (almost certainly) spyware infested propriertary client (in order to poison the credibility of Shareaza). They are not trying to get the trademark of “Shareaza” in what must be the sleaziest move yet. And they know it! (what with them opening a Cypress shell company to do it so that the true perpetrators won’t be litigated against).

All you D&D players reading this, take note. This is how lawful evil should be role-played.

At this point there are a few things all of us should do:

Finally, my personal idea is to put pressure on these scum. What we could probably do is use the Six Degrees and find out who is behind this. Once we do then their friends and families should be informed of their behaviour and perhaps given the appropriate social treatment they so deserve.

Seriously, the law is not our friend here. These people are using the law in order to go against the spirit of it. They are hiding behind shell companies and lawyers because they know they are in the wrong. They deserve no mercy and like Mediasentry before them, they will eventually get what is coming to them.

In Solidarity.

SHAREAZA™ IS THE PROPERTY OF THE SHAREAZA DEVELOPMENT TEAM.