Kopete Or Milk?

Alex lent me a DVD of Kubuntu 7.10. Kubuntu is the version of Ubuntu that is packaged with KDE. For some reason he likes it and since he’s the Linux guru, who am I to second guess him? Hehe.Soon as I got home, I installed to Selene, my Thinkpad X22. The installation went without a hitch and in no time I was in Kubuntu. Everything else does though. I updated everything, played around with the look-and-feel, and was browsing (with a separately installed Firefox) and chatting (with Kopete). Almost everything worked. But unfortunately, both hibernate and standby don’t work! Argh. Now I’ll have to wait for Mr. Linux guru to to help me fix the problem.

Ubuntu

I’ve been playing around with Fedora 7 on Selene, my Thinkpad X22, and I must say I was disappointed. Hibernate and standby didn’t work. Not even with Software Suspend 2. I consider those two to be critical features for a notebook so their not working just won’t do. Upon the recommendation of Alex, I installed Ubuntu 7 Feisty Fawn. Well what do you know? Almost everything, including hibernate and standby, “just works” as advertised out of the box. The two things I noticed didn’t work is the sound and the PCMCIA WiFi. Sound is not critical and the PCMCIA WiFi card is a 3rd party device so it’s no big deal. I like Red Hat and Fedora but does Ubuntu rock! I think I’m a convert.

UPDATE: Alex logged on to Selene and fixed the sound and the WiFi. Thanks man!

A Long Weekend

This weekend was one long weekend. I don’t mean one of those “economic holidays” that the administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo like to declare. No, this one is long for another reason.

The company has been running out of disk storage and it’s about time for a major upgrade. The old capacity was 1.4TB of RAID 5 goodness and we plan to add another 1.4TB. This should suffice for a few months till we can get one of those entry-level NAS appliances which come in capacities like 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. We also planned to take the opportunity to do systems administration training at the same time.

Playing around with storage is never easy. You have to take into consideration the fact that users access it in real time. And of course, there’s the fact that data and information are the most important assets of a company nowadays. This means, if we are to do anything, it has to be done when there are no users. This is only during the weekend. And late Saturday night at that. Also, we will have to be very careful.

We started at around 2PM by removing the old new RAID box from the rack at its storage area. It should have been removed beforehand and in fact that was the plan. But it was never done. It took an hour or so of mechanical work before we were able to wrench the RAID box off. We then carted it over to IT where we configured the RAID array, installed Linux FC6 on the operating system drive, and then started formatting the newly configured RAID drive. Formatting a 1.4TB RAID 5 drive takes time so we started on some training sessions and had dinner while waiting.

At around 9PM formatting was finally completed. By then, all the users have gone home so we shut down the servers and installed the new RAID box in the server rack along with the old RAID box. We then copied the files from the old RAID box to the new RAID box. This is when we hit a speed bump.

We tried various methods of copying: network, external USB drive, and finally drive-to-drive. They were all slow. We have gone through remaining training sessions and had breakfast but by Sunday noon the copying was still not done. We finally decided to leave the servers copying files overnight.

So, yeah, theoretically the long weekend is not over yet.

Undetectable USB Devices in Linux

Finally was able to find a solution to the problem that had been bugging the Linux laptops at the office for quite some time already. The problem was that USB devices were not being detected. The error messages go like:

USB: device not accepting address 2. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 3. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 4. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 5. Error -110
Unlink after no-IRQ? Controller is probably using the wrong IRQ

After quite a bit of searching. I finally found this thread. It turns out that the solution is quite simple. You’ll need to go open your boot loader configuration file (in my case it’s /boot/grub/grub.conf) and put irqpoll as one of the kernel parameters. Reboot and voila! USB devices are now detected.

ImageMagick and JMagick on Linux

INSTALL IMAGEMAGICK
Download libwmf-0.2.8.4-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh libwmf-0.2.8.4-1.i386.rpm
Download ImageMagick-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh ImageMagick-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm

INSTALL IMAGEMAGICK-DEVEL
yum install ghost-script-devel
Download ImageMagick-devel-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh ImageMagick-devel-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm

INSTALL JMAGICK
yum install libtiff-devel
yum install libjpeg-devel
Download JMagick-6.2.4-0.tar.gz
tar xvfz JMagick-6.2.4-0.tar.gz
cd JMagick-6.2.4-0
./configure (or. ./configure –with-java-home=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.03)
make all
make test
make javadoc
vi Make.def
Find INSTALL and change the value to /root/JMagick-6.2.4-0/install-sh
make install

To use JMagick, libJMagick.so must be in a directory where the runtime loader can find it or you must set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH. jmagick.jar must be in your Java class path.