June 2009 Archives

As much as I've railed against quickie distro reviews, I find myself trying a new version of Ubuntu in live CD form and writing just such a piece. I apologize in advance for not running Ubuntu 9.04 longer, but in this evaluation, which has everything to do with the hardware I'm using, I'll explain why this is a wham-bam distro evaluation:

I've been sticking with Ubuntu 8.04 — the LTS version of the distro — on my main Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop for a number of reasons. For one thing, just about everything works (with exceptions being suspend/resume and some rare-but-troublesome crashes when running a USB Wifi stick), and as a production machine, I need it to continue to work.

And both of my identical Toshiba laptops have extremely flaky CD/DVD-ROM drives that don't like most CD-R discs. I managed to burn a Ubuntu 8.04 CD that did boot and install the OS to get me started on this laptop. Since then, I've discovered that commercially produced CD-ROM discs always boot fine. So does DVD+R media; I managed to burn a huge Debian Lenny DVD+R that I've used to set up the other Toshiba.

But I needed a "commercial" CD or DVD as a backup for this Toshiba, and that led me to request a free Ubuntu disc from Canonical.

I would've gladly accepted an 8.04 LTS disc, even though I do have a working CD-R of the release, but since 9.04 is what was offered, I was glad to receive it (along with the Ubuntu stickers that came in the padded envelope; thanks, Canonical!).

I would've gladly paid for the disc, but Canonical only sells them in quantity. If you want just one, you can't pay — your only option is to get it for free.

If you've tried to log into your Yahoo Messenger account with the Pidgin instant-messaging application on any of the many platforms on which the latter runs, it hasn't worked.

It seems that Yahoo is upgrading/reconfiguring its servers, leaving Pidgin users with non-working Yahoo Messenger accounts when accessed through the IM client that brings together the instant-messaging accounts of everything from Google Talk and AIM to Yahoo Messenger and MSN, plus a few more I haven't heard of.

For a few days I used the Yahoo IM client built into Yahoo Mail. I'm somewhat fond of Yahoo Mail and its IM feature, and I do use it from time to time, but I like having the option of using all my IM accounts in one app.

To fix the problem in the Windows version of Pidgin, I first changed one of the server names in the configuration. That didn't work. In Windows, DON'T DO THIS.

Instead, go to the Pidgin site and download the latest version of the app. That will fix the Yahoo issue.

In Linux/Unix, different distributions are handling the problem differently. Some are pumping new versions of Pidgin through their repositories, and those should show up in the updates on your system.

But in Ubuntu 8.04 — the LTS (long-term support) version of Linux, unless you want to install a new version of Pidgin manually, you'll just have to fix the old one.

Luckily it's easy (I figured it out from this Softpedia page):

Once you're running Pidgin (the version in Ubuntu 8.04 is Pidgin 2.4.1 in case you wanted to know), in the menu, click Accounts, then mouse down to your Yahoo account, mouse over to Edit Account and left-click it.

Then click on the Advanced tab, and under Pager server, if you have this:

scs.msg.yahoo.com

Change that line to read this:

cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com

That's right, just add cn. to the beginning of this line, then click Save, and the fix is done.

I don't know if you necessarily must quit and reload Pidgin to make the fix work, but that's what I did. Once I saved my change, I went to Buddies - Quit to kill Pidgin, then I restarted it from the menu.

For now, at least, Pidgin is working with Yahoo Messenger buddies. I'll report back if that changes.

As far as fixes go, this is a minor one.

I wondered why the search box and my saved searches disappeared from the Twitter.com page. But knowing that the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett were straining the entire Internet in general, I knew that the prone-to-overloading Twitter didn't stand a chance.

Turns out that's exactly what happened, according to this mocoNews item.

Anybody who's used Twitter knows that the exponentially growing popularity of the microblogging service means that it's a major news event or two away from collapsing entirely.

As my fellow blogger Matt Asay says, what do you expect from a free service that's not even trying to make money?

I won't blame everything on Twitter. The whole Internet is feeling it

10:30 p.m. update: Twitter search has returned. (The fact that I'm noting this at all means I am sorely in need of getting a life.)

I'm on the desk at Dailynews.com following the Michael Jackson story, which began this afternoon with reports that he was taken to UCLA Medical Center after suffering from cardiac arrest.

Now, at 3:40 p.m., most media outlets are either citing TMZ.com or the L.A. Times and saying that the King of Pop is dead.

I'll be following the story all night, adding photo galleries, video, additional stories and anything else I find.

And watch this space for reports on the impact of the Michael Jackson story on the technology around us. Right now I tried to tweet this but got a more-terse-than-usual message about Twitter being overcapacity.

I see the resemblance.

I decided that I was tired of brown, brown, brown in Ubuntu, so I changed out the wallpaper on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop to this blue-themed image from the fine folks at GNOME. I also changed the way my "theme" looks by going to System - Preferences - Appearance in the GNOME menu and picking something less brown, more blue.

I know that GNOME-themed distros are usually blueish in hue and that Ubuntu's brown represents a departure from that blueness, but in my case, going all the way back to Ubuntu 6.06, I'm done with brown.

Please read all 1,208 others ...

I'm kidding.

No, I'm not.

I'm no coding guru. And I feel like having to write my own scripts to get stuff done in Unix/Linux is all too much like reinventing the wheel.

Be that as it may, I hacked together these two short scripts to back up my /home files in Ubuntu 8.04 to an external USB drive. I put the scripts in /usr/local/bin and made them executable. I'm lazy enough that I used the Nautilus file manager to do this.

I run the scripts with sudo, meaning in my user account, I open a terminal and do this, entering my password when prompted:

$ sudo usb-backup

$ sudo usb-backup-exclude

For the second script, I created an "exclude file," which the script uses to exclude whichever directories or files I wish. In this case I use it to exclude the .gvfs directory, which breaks the script (and doesn't need to be copied anyway) and in this case to exclude my Thunderbird mail files, since they take so damn long to back up that doing it every day is something I'm not fond of. The beauty of the exclude file is that I can modify it while keeping the script the same.

I'm sure there are many of you who can do and have done a better job than this, but these two scripts appear to work, and that's what counts for me anyway.

There are some pounded-out notes for the scripts; feel free to remove them. They won't affect how the scripts work.

Here are the scripts:

usb-backup:

#! /bin/bash
# Use rsync to back up the /home folder to a 4 GB USB flash drive
# --delete allows for deletion of files on the backup that have been previously deleted on the source drive
# using --exclude to keep rsync from trying to back up ~/.gvfs
# Finally able to remove --ignore-errors now that .gvfs is excluded
rsync -av --delete --exclude 'home/steven/.gvfs' /home /media/disk/ubuntu
exit 0

usb-backup exclude:

#! /bin/bash
# Use rsync to back up the /home folder to a 4 GB USB flash drive
# --delete allows for deletion of files on the backup that have been previously deleted on the source drive
# setting up an exclude file to back up some directories and not others.
# Finally able to remove --ignore-errors now that .gvfs is excluded
rsync -av --delete --ignore-errors --exclude-from '/home/steven/Documents/shell_scripts/exclude' /home /media/disk/ubuntu
exit 0

And here is my "exclude" file which, as you can see from the script above, lives at /home/steven/Documents/shell_scripts/exclude:

/home/steven/.gvfs
/home/steven/.mozilla-thunderbird

.gvfs note: I've done similar scripts before in OpenBSD and Debian, and I don't believe either used the GNOME Virtual Filesystem, so there was no need to exclude ~/.gvfs when using rsync.

I've been bringing more data into my main Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installation on one of my two Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops, and I continue to be satisfied with the performance of what by most accounts is the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution.

No, its GNOME desktop isn't as fast as Debian's. But even though I do have Xfce (and not the full Xubuntu) installed on this Ubuntu laptop, I'm still using the brownish-themed GNOME that ships with the distro.

I'm getting used to all the GNOME-ish touches in the Nautilus file manager and in Ubuntu/GNOME in general that makes a full-fledged desktop environment such a nice place to work.

It's been many months since I last used Puppy Linux. I bet more than a year has passed since I seriously ran Puppy, still one of the best Unix-like distributions/projects for older, underpowered computers.

I decided tonight to break out the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt (233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 144 MB RAM), which has OpenBSD 4.2 on the 3 GB hard drive (yes, I know 4.5 is out, and yes I do have the CD set, and yes, I'll probably reinstall) and two pup_save files in its 0.5 GB Linux partition.

During my extensive tests of operating systems on this platform, I ended up running the aforementioned OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13, the latter from live CD.

I'm in Puppy 2.13 right now. I know it's old. I know Puppy 4.something is out now and that the project is in some sort of turmoil.

Now that the June 12 deadline has passed and the era of analog television is supposed to be over, most of the channels have indeed gone dark.

It's a bit eerie to turn on an old analog set (of which I have no shortage at present), flip through the channels and see nothing but snow.

In Los Angeles however, analog channels 2, 4 and 5 continue broadcasting. Except that they're all showing the same program: instructions in English and Spanish about how to hook up a digital TV converter box and antenna to receive DTV broadcasts on an older analog set.

If you didn't get ready for DTV, you'll learn all you need to know with what now appears to be the only programming available to non-DTV viewers.

KCAL doesn't offer embedded video from its player, but you can see the video of Channel 9's June 12 report via this link. And this much better video covers the shutoff of KCAL and KCBS Channel 2's analog signals. plus an earlier report before the analog signals of channels 2 and 9 were shut off.

KABC's embedded video player isn't working (at least not in this blog), so here's a link to the video of KABC Channel 7's final moments of analog broadcasting.

KABC's embedded player isn't working, so here's a link to the video of Channel 7's report on the night before the June 12 DTV switch.

Watch it here:

This is the screen I got this afternoon when trying to send a tweet. How often have you seen it?