Trying out KDE

I stumbled upon Linus Torvalds' criticisms of Gnome and endorsement of KDE (old news to other geeks) so while I have a few minutes between other things I'm downloading KDE to give it a whirl after using Gnome for years. Ubuntu makes it easy, of course. Ten years ago I'd have to download sources, track down dependencies and compile, 5 years ago I'd have to download and install packages, now I do this:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

then log out, select the KDE desktop, and log in. I like easy.

The secret gyration

How to get vmware server 1.0.6 working under ubuntu 8.04:

[Fri Jul 25 14:13:00 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop vmware-server-distrib]$ vmware
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
[Fri Jul 25 14:13:25 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop vmware-server-distrib]$ cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:29 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:31 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$ sudo mkdir bak
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:40 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$ sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1 bak/

Ubuntu install-info kludge

There's a conflict between texinfo's install-info and the one distributed with Gutsy - if you install texinfo, its install-info will fail during Gutsy's auto updates. If you typically install software via apt-get and you don't need texinfo's install-info, just rename it to, say, install-info-texinfo. That will move it out of the way so Gutsy can find its own install-info. Then updates ahoy - all is well again.

There's always a catch

I installed Wordpress today so Sarah the diarist can have a blog. After a hitting a spot of trouble I considered signing her up for a free public blog at wordpress.com but I quickly woke up and realized that's not an option. When she's an adult she can blog whatever whe wants wherever she wants; til then she can blog on our home intranet.

The catch: when we accessed the blog from another computer via http://billw-desktop/sarah/wordpress the address was translated to http://localhost/sarah/wordpress. Turns out I had her configuration slightly wrong: under wp-admin -> Options, I had used http://localhost/sarah/wordpress in "WordPress address (URL)" and "Blog address (URL)"; after changing localhost to the computer's router-assigned IP address, all was well - now she can blog from any computer in the house.

Here are a couple of samples of her writing. First, from her third-person wikipedia entry:

Caroline Margaret White is two-and-a-half years old. (All of Sarah's brothers and sisters are and-a-halfs, but not her.) The White family does not know her favorite thing to do, but she "sings" a lot in baby talk. Though she is almost three, she can't talk much.

And this from her first blog post, about our Halloween celebration yesterday:

After a while it was time for the scavenger hunt. We were supposed to find some candy. Daddy had made clues, and the first one was in Daddy's pocket. It said:

Go into the pink room, where ghosts blow through the air. Look at the hockey table, the one that blows air.

I forgot whether those are the exact words he used, but never mind... maybe he will tell them to me later.

The scavenger hunt was upstairs. Daddy came with us. He said he did it 'to protect us from ghosts and goblins.' There were no ghosts or goblins up there, but sometimes Daddy jumped out through the door of a room we were passing by, and roared like a monster. We laughed when he did that! Eventually we found the candy, on the top bunk of the bunk-beds in the blue room, in a basket that looked like a jack-o'-lantern.

vmware server under ubuntu 7.10

At the moment you need to install it by hand; here's what worked for me.

Making the jump to hyperspace

I'm about to upgrade my computer from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 using their upgrade tool. Oremus.

Later: Dang, that was a mess. The upgrade tool just disappeared after issuing hundreds of warnings and error messages, then it rebooted into a kernel panic. Now I've wiped the disk and installed 7.10 from scratch; I had backed up all the important stuff before upgrading so most things are working now.

Given my backups, I've been able to do this in about 2 hours:

• install 7.10 from scratch
• install essential build libraries for cvs, texinfo and emacs, then download and compile them
• install kasteroids :-)
• copy emacs setup files from backups
• download and install LAMP (linux-based apache, mysql, php)
• download and install mediawiki
• import my home wiki backups into the new mediawiki installation
• install & configure nfs packages and mount nfs dirs from our various computers
• install mplayer (mp3 player)
• install codecs for the totem video player
• install debian's pyblosxom package, then install from the latest distro at sourceforge
• generate a new ssh key and install it on the various machines at work

UPDATE: the problems may have been that texinfo's /usr/local/bin/install-info was shadowing the distro's /usr/sbin/install-info. If I were to do this again, I'd move texinfo's install-info out of the way first, as in this kludge.

Encyclopedist detection kit

To determine whether any of your kids are natural-born encyclopedists, install Mediawiki and turn them loose. This morning Sarah asked whether we could have a wikipedia about our family, a "Whitopedia". Knowing it would be fairly easy with Ubuntu, I said yes and spent a few minutes here and there running through the steps between other tasks. Now it's set up and Sarah and Christopher are both clacking away writing initial biographical entries on their computers (old castaways that handle Ubuntu just fine).

I set up mediawiki on my heavy-duty high-horsepower work computer and poked holes in its firewall for theirs. They can get to it by using my computer's name as a web address: http://ubuntu-home/wiki.

For googlers, that's MediaWiki 1.11.0 running under Ubuntu 7.04.

More home sysadmin

The Windows box finally wonked out. I've booted it from an Ubuntu 7.04 install disk to read the Windows NTFS disk and I'm rsync'ing important files from there over the LAN to my new Ubuntu box. After lifeboat operations are complete, I dunno - wipe & install Ubuntu? My old copy of Windows? Both? We'll see.

How to switch monitors in ubuntu 7.04

So I have a little 4-foot "church basement" table in our library with two computers on/under it, along with their keyboards and mice (obviously I need a KVM switch - maybe the junkyard will have one next payday). The new computer gets the big monitor, naturally, and the old one gets some old monitor I dug out of the garage. The problem is that ubuntu 7.04 was installed on the old computer when it used the big monitor. Now that I've switched monitors on it, it doesn't recognize the new one.

Solution: boot into recovery mode (or whatever it's called - hit Esc at the right moment during startup), then at the root prompt do this:

dpkg-reconfigure -pcritical xserver-xorg

How to install VMware under ubuntu

Vide: VMware runs beautifully on my new ubuntu 7.04 installation. I'm installing xubuntu under vmware so I can do some Mathematica frontend craziness. Some of the documentation tests open each of the 10000+ files in a Mathematica installation. On this new machine this happens fast enough to short-circuit the mammalian the nervous system if you happen to look at the windows flashing by as they open and close.

I couldn't find a way in gnome to isolate all an application's windows in one workspace and I couldn't get multiple X sessions working, so I'm giving vmware a shot. Very promising so far.

How to compile cvs emacs in a fresh ubuntu 7.04 installation

Once you've installed ubuntu 7.04 the very next thing you need to do is compile cvs emacs, right? Of course. Here's how.

First, to compile programs you need various development libraries (and you may want to grab some optional goodies):

sudo apt-get install build-essential libc6-dev libgtk2.0-0
libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common libgtk2.0-dev libjpeg62-dev libjpeg62
libncurses5-dev libpng12-dev libpng12-0 libsm-dev libtiff4-dev
libtiff4 libx11-dev libxext-dev libxmu-dev libxmu-headers libxpm-dev
libxt-dev xlibs-dev libungif4-dev flashplugin-nonfree gnomesword
sword-language-pack-en sword-text-web

get cvs so you can checkout emacs

mkdir ~/software
cd ~/software
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/source/stable/1.11.22/cvs-1.11.22.tar.gz
tar xvf cvs-1.11.22.tar.gz
cd cvs-1.11.22/
./configure
make
sudo make install

get texinfo so you'll have documentation in emacs

cd ~/software
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.11.tar.gz
tar xvf texinfo-4.11.tar.gz
cd texinfo-4.11/
./configure
make
sudo make install

checkout the latest emacs and compile (I hate the gui scrollbars)

cd ~/software
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
cd emacs
./configure --without-toolkit-scroll-bars
make bootstrap

I run emacs from its src dir by putting this in my ~/.bashrc:

PATH=/home/billw/software/emacs/src:$PATH

Note that you should check gnu.org for the latest versions of cvs and texinfo. The entire process from inserting the ubuntu install cd in a bare wiped machine to launching a freshly-compiled emacs took 45 minutes this evening.