Geeky Baldisms

Greetings. An intro is in order.

I'm Ron Enderland, professional geek. I work for a Fortune 500 company doing web development on intranet apps. I also do network stuff (I'm a CCNA) and even a day of help desk per week. We're a small shop.

I got my first PC in 1993, and it came with, of course, Windows. Ten years later, I was a Windows troubleshooting machine. Troubleshooting Windows means making lots of guesses and trying lots of things that may not seem to make any sense. Such it is in the world of closed-source software.

That was one of the things that made it tough to switch to Linux. Troubleshooting Linux issues involves logic. Windows problems rely more on stabs in the dark. When a DLL is overwritten, finding it can be impossible. Many times, a reinstall of the operating system is the only answer.

When you're used to solving problems based on hunches, switching to logical troubleshooting can be difficult.

Twenty Reasons Why You Should Try Ubuntu

1. It makes Steve Ballmer very, very mad.
2. The proponents of Ubuntu aren't in it for the money.
3. If you're a Baby Boomer, picture Microsoft as The Man.
4. It has the most newbie-friendly forum out there. Seriously, the moderators have the patience of Job.
5. It just feels good to run open-source, free software.
6. Kiss DRM insanity goodbye. Your recorded media belongs to YOU.
7. Want new software? Install/uninstall completely FREE killer apps through Synaptics Package Manager.
8. The live CD is the ultimate "try before you buy." Except you're not buying anything.
9. Looking at a basic Vista computer purchase? You'll need at least a gig of RAM and a dual-core to make it run decently fast. Oh, and embedded DRM, which provides you zero benefit but is there at the insistence of the recording and movie industries, is a big reason why it's such a hardware hog. Ubuntu runs all day long on 512 MB of RAM and three-year old processors.
10. You can plead ignorance when friends and family ask your for Vista troubleshooting help.
11. Steve Ballmer hates Linux badly enough that he's making comical unsubstantiated claims about its alleged infringement of M$ code. Ubuntu REALLY doesn't want or need any M$ code, thank you.
12. Want to spend over $300 on an office suite? No? Then how about a free one included with the OS?
13. Compare troubleshooting a software issue with Ubuntu to chasing one down for a Windows app. I think you'll find a tremendous amount of difference in the number of Google returns.
14. Defrag? What's that?
15. Get used to your desktop, and it won't turn into some bizarrely different looking thing every few years. Changes to Linux desktops are gradual, not sudden.
16. When you run Windows, you're running the result of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of highly-paid programmers. When you run Ubuntu, you're running the result of the efforts of mere thousands of volunteer programmers who simply want you to have a better product.
17. Adding to Windows' overhead is spyware prevention, virus protection, and Windows Firewall, designed to keep intruders out. While Ubuntu may someday become a target of attacks, right now you can run free of bug killers and bad-guy-blockers.
18. The lack of WGA or its equivalent. The very idea of M$ running a program without your consent designed SOLELY to make certain you're not a thief is simply lousy, lousy customer service.
19. Your software will be updated and upgraded from now on for FREE.
20. Oh, one last thing. The only thing Steve Ballmer hates worse than Linux is Google!

Want to learn from my mistakes? Here we go.

First of all, resist the urge to import your Windows machine into VMWare. Unless it's chock full of software you've paid for and that needs to phone home to work, instead I recommend you simply start from scratch.

Case in point: I imported my XP Media Edition machine. Footprint was 70 gigs! And it refused to compact via VMWare tools. It would peg my dual-core AMD machine after running for an hour or so.

I finally blew it away and started over.

I now run XP Pro and my processor usage remains minimal. The machine's footprint, with Dreamweaver MX, Quicken 2006, Paint Shop Pro 7, and Open Office is 4.4 gigs.

Don't have a serial number? All I can say is use your imagination. I did, and worked around it legally, though Microsoft might quibble over the details. Let's just say that if a machine that was licensed for XP Pro NEVER USED it, my conscience is just as clean as it would be in importing a physical machine into VMWare that will no longer have Windows as its OS.

However, don't overlook another easy solution: Windows 2000.

VMWare is an esential part of my migration to Ubuntu, but it's not perfect out of the box.

For example, USB support is not enabled by default for your virtual machines.

There's an easy fix.

Either precede the following commands with sudo, or open a root terminal.

Type the following commands:

I have upgraded a couple of computers to Hardy Heron this last week. My desktop machine at work (Dell 620) went nearly flawlessly. The only hitch was weird screen resolution on one of my two monitors. That was fixed with a manual edit of my xorg.conf file.

Things didn't go quite so smoothly on my home machine (HP 1483w). The Nvidia video was fubarred, I unistalled and reinstalled the proprietary drivers, and finally got over the hump by running the nvidia-glx-new package (version 169.12+2.6.24.12-16.34) AND the nvidia-settings package. That provided me with a tool that I could use to notify my system that I had a widescreen 19" monitor. Once I did that, I finally obtained 1440x920 resolution.

More weirdness: Open Office didn't like the Java that was installed. Uninstalling/reinstalling the Java didn't help. I finally removed OO through Synaptics and downloaded the install straight from Sun. Even then I had to point it to the JRE.

Finally, I had a hard time getting VMWare back in business. It didn't survive the upgrade, and when I went to reinstall, I got compile errors.

Then I found this forum. I untarred the update (located here) and ran the script that came with it. VMWare was back!

However, my brother still has compile errors on his system (not sure what it is). He's going to wait until VMWare releases a version specifically for Hardy.

Another bit of strangeness: My second hard drive had exactly the same files on it as the first! This was resolved by editing /etc/fstab and changing it from /dev/hda to /dev/sdb1. Strange, but easy to spot and fix. Note: I was informed of a better solution, using the actual UUID of the drive. Now, its wandering is a thing of the past. Typical fstab listing: UUID=f13f7091-63a3-4d4e-b4b7-a8e7945f683f /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2

I woke up feeling funny yesterday morning.

The sun was shining brightly through the window, but it was the same window that the setting sun uses to illuminate my bedroom! Strange...

I went to the sink to shave. Being slightly OCD, I tend to notice small things. Thus, I noted that the water was swirling counterclockwise down the drain. I live several thousand miles north of the equator, this made no sense at all.

So I thought I would log on and check out the news. But when I moved the mouse to wake up my sleeping system, it looked...different.

The start button was gone, replaced by a little orange circle.

My brand-new machine that I had brought home from Best Buy two days earlier had come with Windows Vista. This didn't look anything at all like Vista.

I pressed the little orange circle. The menu popped up, but again, it looked...different. It was leaner, I guess. It was more to the point. But I missed all of the cool visual stuff that Vista would do.

Where was my Vista? What had happened? I looked for Internet Explorer but couldn't find it. But the Start button had a menu choice called “Internet,” and there was something called Firefox Web Browser there. I opened it, and sure enough, there was my Google home page. Thank goodness not EVERYTHING had changed. I went to cnn.com to try to find out why things were so weird all of a sudden.

The headlines looked pretty much the same, wars, typhoons, outrage over gas hitting $2.00 a gallon...HUH? It was nearing $4.00 when I filled up last Monday!

Again, strange, but by now my slightly OCD eye had been caught by an ad for TigerDirect.com: Get a loaded PC for $199! Wow, that sounded cheap. So I clicked on it.

The TigerDirect site gave the details: Intel dual-core E2200, 1 gig of RAM, 200G hard drive, speakers, multimedia reader, DVD burner, and Ubuntu 8.02.

I was familiar with everything but this Ubuntu. What was that? I typed Ubuntu into Google and was directed to their website. The site was pretty cool, actually, until I started reading about this Ubuntu thing. Then, I became puzzled.

Ubuntu was an operating system. That rang a bell. I had heard the techies at work refer to Windows XP as an operating system, and how much better it was than Vista. It seemed like I had even heard them mention Ubuntu, as well, in those breakroom conversations that they had that I had eavesdropped on and found nearly impossible to keep up with.

I looked the site over for Vista machines. I didn't find any! There were Macs, bare-bones systems with no operating systems, and others with operating systems like Fedora, PCLinux, and SUSE. But no Vista, XP, or Windows anything.

Well, my mama didn't raise no fool. That 200 buck computer must be missing some pretty important features to be that cheap. So I read the fine print.

This article by Computerworld's Cyber-Cynic, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, says that MS has fubarred their desktop scenario so badly by dropping XP (despite customer pleadings to the contrary) and pushing Vista that the door is wide open for Linux and Macs to take over a significant chunk of the desktop market.

I agree to a point.

Yes, Vista is crap, for many reason, not the least of which is found here. Yes, for every Vista apologist on comment boards, I would estimate that there are at least five detractors, probably ten. Yes, it's finally the dream OS as far as the RIAA and the MPAA are concerned.

But what is going to have to happen is that PC manufacturers get fed up enough to tell MS to shove their pre-install policy where the sun's rays fail to penetrate.

Do you really think people would go out and buy Vista to run their computers if it wasn't already installed? Take a look at Vista's store shelf sales to see the answer.

Microsoft, which was nailed by the DOJ way back in 1994 for "monopolistic" practices that strongly discouraged PC manufacturers from offering any operating system but theirs, has apparently complied with the letter of the law, as far as the government is concerned.

Computerworld columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols recently posted this article on his blog.

In it, he showed how a serious economic downturn may be good news for the open-source movement.

He outlined five specific programs that can be replaced by FOSS alternatives.

The five are MS Office, Outlook, Quicken, Sharepoint, and Windows itself.

The FOSS replacements are Open Office, Thunderbird, GnuCash, Alfresco, and, of course, Linux.

V-N is an open-source advocate, and we need more of 'em. He doesn't like Windows. That is generally what happens to someone who gets into the world of FOSS.

That is off-putting to many who have been happily running Windows for years. But you have to understand that once you have been exposed to something that is vastly superior to what you have long been used to, the natural reaction is anger at whatever it was that had earlier led you to believe that it was as good as things got.

This is particularly the case with Windows, which has proven itself to be adequate at best, criminally underhanded at worst in its long-term ride at the top of the O/S market.

I just got off the phone with my best friend, for whom I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on his laptop.

I installed it two weeks ago. His main concern with Vista was that it wouldn't play ball with his office network. It couldn't see the shared backup folder that i had set up for him years earlier, and also couldn't see his shared office printer.

I told him I didn't work on Vista, and he said that he wanted to hire me to get RID of it and install Ubuntu.

I did so, and his wireless worked out of the box (it was a new Gateway laptop, i don't recall the model). He also had good high-resolution video that played nicely with an additional plugged-in monitor. And his son had a DVD handy, so I got the codecs installed to read it.

And, of course, he can also see his shared folder and print to his shared printer ;-)

However, he called me up this morning feeling frustrated. His computer wouldn't connect to his home wireless network, and it also bombed on any DVD's he tried to play.

I consider the problems to be my fault, and I am making a mental note to make sure and do a more thorough job on my next Linux-converted laptop. Here are five steps you need to follow to make certain that you have a happy customer yourself:

I recently switched from AT&T DSL to Cox Internet. My download speed went from about 900k to speeds which vary from 3 meg (when usage is high) to nearly 20 meg (early in the morning). However, surfing didn't speed up much, if any at all.

The issue was that I would spend much time looking at "Looking up google.com" in the bottom bar of Firefox. In a word, Cox's DNS servers here in NW Arkansas are horrible.

The fix to that was to set up other DNS servers in my Belkin router. However, for some reason, the router wouldn't propagate the changes to my /etc/resolv.conf file. It continued to list the three slow Cox DNS servers and nothing else.

My fix could have been as simple as editing the file. However, I decided to dial things up a notch by installing dnsmasq. It's a local DNS cache that will greatly speed up name lookups.

Here's how to do it the GUI way:

Install dnsmasq with Synaptic Package Manager.

Now sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf.

Here's what mine looks like:

domain Belkin
search Belkin
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 4.2.2.1
nameserver 4.2.2.2
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 192.168.2.1
nameserver 68.105.28.11
nameserver 68.105.29.11
nameserver 68.105.28.12

I recently made this post in reply to a Windows user (a reasonable one) at Computerworld:

Here's the "profound" truth that I finally learned about Linux:

You can fix stuff.

One of the most maddening things about Windows (including XP) is that if something goes awry in the system, as is bound to happen sooner or later with ANY OS, the fix is usually reinstalling.

Office pukes? IE gets squirrely? Cut-and-paste not working consistently? Back up your data as best you can, and let the reformatting begin. Or, if you're REALLY lucky, a system restore. But don't hold your breath.

If something breaks in Linux, you go online and quickly find a solution. Or, with a little experience, you learn to edit the bogus config file, or reinstall a specific library, or sometimes simply do a ctrl+alt+backspace to restart your X server.

I **LOVE** VMWare. And I really love VMWare 2.0.

But, despite its blazing speed improvement and improved console experience, it had a problem on my Ubuntu 8.10 system.

Notice I said had.

My keyboard mapping was fubarred on the console window. My back arrow key didn't work, neither did my delete key. Other keys may have been affected too, but these were the two that I noticed.

Then, I found this website that provides three fixes.

In my case, the fix that worked was this one:

Edit /etc/vmware/config as root.

Add this line: xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true

Restart your virtual machine.

That's all it took for me! There are two other fixes listed at the site if you're not as lucky as I was.

My current desktop system is no slouch: a 2006 HP a1483w with dual-core AMD, two gigs of RAM, and built-in Nvidia graphics with 256 MB of shared memory. Hey, with two gigs, there's plenty to go around.

A gamer would sneer at it, but it's more than powerful enough to run Ubuntu Intrepid with a VMWare 2.0 Server XP machine running 24/7 in the background.

Sometimes, I run my 2K machine virtually, too. And all three systems coexist nicely with barely noticeable speed hits.

But I have decided to purchase a bare-bones system and build it up from scratch with Ubuntu.

I will probably buy through TigerDirect, since I've always had good luck with fast deliveries, getting what I expected, and no-hassle service on the lone order that I had to cancel.

I know that there is some scuttlebutt out there about their less-than-stellar handling of rebates, but I make it a point to never buy an item with a mail-in rebate attached.

I expect the process to go very smoothly. I have done some groundbreaking work by placing my home directory on a separate partition. In fact, it's on a separate SATA drive from my operating system, so I plan on taking it out of my existing machine and transferring it to my next one.

I can't give too many details about my 9-to-5, they are a conservative company who doesn't like their employees running on at the mouth about their business.

But I manage an intranet, one loaded with php/mysql apps. I also communicate with Oracle, SQL Server, and any other platform out there which allows ADODB connections.

The intranet has to be Active Directory-aware. Most of the apps are locked down to limited access based on group membership.

I have managed to put apache to work on Windows Server 2003 usind mod_sspi_auth. That weaned me from IIS. IIS is designed to work with MS-specific web technologies, and making it play ball with php is like getting a horse to dance. It's possible, but the horse will never dance as well as Gregory Hines.

But let's face it. I'm still subject to the whims of Windows. Updates that mangle customized coding, the occasional system foobar, the need to reboot at least once a month, that all is the sort of thing that causes one to get paged at 3:00 AM.

Thus, I decided to spend some time on building a Linux system and put mod_ntlm_auth to work. The payoff would be freedom from Windows.

I guess you have to be a developer specializing in open-source apps to know just how sweet that feeling would be.

This site gives you the details on what procedure I followed. What follows here are the hurdles that I ran into myself, and how I cleared them.

Today's the day that 9.04 is released, and guess what? Ubuntu.com's servers are swamped!

I don't think it's a DOS attack from Windows zombies.

I believe the entire world is downloading Jaunty Jackalope!

Thanks, Ubuntu team, for getting millions turned onto Linux :-D

Logwatch is an invaluable tool. It will sum up your error logs and send them to you in an email on a daily basis, if you set up a cron job for it.

I have taken to setting it up on every *ix server I manage.

But the daily logwatch entries from my CentOS web server that I lease were huge, ungainly monsters, due to reporting the activity of every bot (thanks again, Microsoft) that was vainly attempting to use my server to send out the latest VI4AGR4 spam.

I'm more concerned with attempted ssh breakins, Clamav scan results, FTP activity, etc.

So I started doing Google searches for stuff like logwatch ignore courier mail.

Nada.

Fortunately, I've gotten geeky enough over the years to go digging through conf files on my own, and I solved the problem.

I love Ubuntu. However, I'm not nuts about the six month rewrites.

So, I decided to try a couple of less-often-rewritten distros on a Dell GX 755.

A month later, I'm back to Ubuntu. Here's why:

Wow, what an amazing distribution I just stumbled on to. It's called Titan Lev, and is distributed by http://www.affordy.com/. It's not free, but you get a bunch of test drives from the iso. And if you decide it's for you, it's a measly 25 bucks. It's also Ubuntu-based.

Basically, these folks have duplicated the Windows environment for those wanting to try something else, but who have gotten used to the MS way of running your computer.

I'll have more to say after I actually run the desktop, but it looks extremely impressive. They're based in Israel (so a nice "up yours" to Al Qaeda fans by using it), and I hope that they've covered their tracks legally. After all, they actually include Internet Explorer in the distro.

Anyhoo, check it out.

I love Ubuntu. It's been my choice for a desktop Linux for three years.

But I just veered down a side road. it's still Ubuntu under the hood, but the distro is actually Linux Mint.

Mint is basically Ubuntu with all proprietary codecs thrown in. It also comes with its own menu manager. It's released a month or so after Ubuntu.

I recently upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10, and something went screwy. I was getting X crashes, anywhere from one a week to several a day. I've successfully upgraded in the past, but this was a bad one. So I was going to have to rebuild.

I decided to give Mint a shot. I'd heard good things about it. I wasn't disappointed.

I installed the late beta of Ubuntu 4.10 this week. Here are my thoughts on the process and the product.

First of all, if you are not already keeping your home directory on a separate partition, I strongly recommend that you do. Once the install is done, everything looks pretty much like you had it before, including app preferences, look and feel, saved Firefox passwords, etc. It's nice not to have to reconfigure everything from scratch.

Second, upgrading was not an option, since I went from Mint back to Ubuntu. But the whole process took about two hours, and I really think a clean install is the way to go.

Third, strangely, I got no video on the install CD. I ended up downloading the text-based version and installed from there. And you know what? I actually prefer the text-based method.

Fourth, you MUST install Ubuntu Tweak if you haven't already. It instantly edits all sorts of obscure config files for you, making it simple to have a system that does exactly what you want it to do.

Well, crap. The official Ubuntu 10.04 release didn't play nice with the Nvidia onboard video on my 2006 vintage HP a1483w. Booting led to a screen that was black. my monitor didn't detect a signal, and went dormant. What made me crazy was that I had run into similar issues before, and was able to boot into runlevel three (no GUI) and work on the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to at least get ugly video back, so that I could have the GUI running to experiment on.

In the Redhat world, hitting escape when the grub menu pops up allows you to edit the command line. Adding a '3' to the end of the string that calls the Linux kernel overrides /etc/inittab and sends you straight to runlevel 3.

Well, I was quite perturbed to discover that the boot string editing trick no worky with Ubuntu. Adding a 3 to the boot string had no effect at all. Ctrl+alt+f1 didn't work, either, no alternative login screen.

What's even weirder is that there is NO /etc/inittab file to dictate system runlevel.

In short, I simply could not boot into anything but a broken GUI, i.e. a black screen.

Time to fall back on an old friend.

Enter CentOS 5.

I am very impressed with Ubuntu 10.04. Except for the fact that I was greeted with blank screen from the install CD, and had to get around that by booting with the nomodest option. See details here.

Anyhow, somehow, my desktop got ugly. Instead of my razor-sharp 1680x1050, I was topped out at 1360x768. That might be fine on my old 19" widescreen, but not on my gorgeous Samsung 24".

The problem proved to be amazingly perplexing. Several times in the course of editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I fubarred things badly enough that X wouldn't even start.

Finally, a solution was found. I found an xorg.conf online that restored every resolution. Click to continue, and I'll share it with you.