I did experience some really odd screen flicker under X right after upgrading to openSUSE 11.2, but that’s already cleared up. Restarting X didn’t help, but there were a pile of updates in the official 11.2 updates repo, which I installed soon after finishing the upgrade with the DVD. I suppose that something in those fixed the flicker. Most of the time, it wasn’t bad enough to irritate me, but sometimes it was.

The upgrade process was pretty smooth. The only problem that I had was that in the middle of installing packages, YaST stopped and warned me that I didn’t have enough disk space to complete the upgrade. It sat there waiting for me to tell it to either bail-out or go on. I pressed <ALT>+<F2> to get to a terminal. From that shell I ran these commands:

# lvextend -L 10G /dev/reaver/suse-usr
# resize_reiserfs /dev/reaver/suse-usr

Those commands finished in less time that it took me to type them (and, yes, that is saying something). Back in the graphical installer, I clicked the Next button and it went on.

BTW, that LV was 7GB before.

Another odd thing is the the audio mute light keeps coming back on, even though the card isn’t muted. If I right-click the kmixer tray icon and select mute, it doesn’t toggle that light. I’ve got both in sync several times and a few to 30ish seconds later, the light is on again. Weird.

I was using the ATI driver repo to install the proprietary ATI driver. I’ve been using that up until now because that was the one that worked with the Radeon X1370 GPU built into this notebook (the X1270 is the X1250, but with both shared and dedicated RAM). I’m now using the fully open-source radeonhd driver, which finally has support for my chip. No 3D, though, even though the documentation says that I should have that. Perhaps I’ll have some downtime during the upcoming holiday to figure it out. I’m certainly noticing the performance drop without it.

Both Thursday night and again this evening, I’ve been working on getting all the development environments’ pieces back into working order. There’s always something that needs fixing when I upgrade the OS. This time, the big troublemaker has been Ruby on Rails. openSUSE 11.2 ships rails 2.3.2. I’m glad for the upgrade, but, sheesh; there’s been more than a few speed bumps to work out. At this point, I have WEBrick working, but dispatch.{f,}cgi isn’t happy, yet. The Apache 2.2 with mod_fcgid bits are working, it’s the dispatch scripts that are currently breaking. I’m thinking that I’ll write a separate post about all of that rigmarole.

I am finding that Konqueror is being a little frustrating. I’m using Firefox more than I ever have before on Linux. Firefox has been my preferred browser on Windows for a long time, but Konqueror has been the flat out best web browser for me for over a decade now. It’s mostly odd behavior with some JavaScript found in some apps, including this blog. I’m writing posts with Firefox for now. Don’t worry, though; I’m not giving up on Konqueror any time soon.

Overall, this has been a pretty easy upgrade. Considering that I’m making a major change in graphics drivers (for the better, overall), I’m amazed at how well that’s working out, already. Audio quality is great and all the features that I’ve tested are working flawlessly, but the sound does seem a bit quieter than before (at the same volume settings). That could be the particular media files, too.

That’s enough! I’ve had it; I’m going to prevent this from bothering me again.

Well, the right way to fix this is to grab a clue-bat and use it on the Maildrop developer(s) who decided that hardcoding a 50 MB log file size limit into Maildrop was a good idea, until they change their mind(s). Seriously, though, I’m going to send them a patch for this lame duck.

In the meantime, I’ve written rotate-user-maildrop-logs, a shell script to place into your /etc/cron.daily/ (or similar) directory. I am releasing this under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 (a.k.a. GPLv3).

I really like Maildrop. It’s great for me, but it’s not for everyone. For example, my wife isn’t going to sit down and use vi (or any other text editor) to maintain her very own ~/.mailfilter file. For this reason, I will be switching to Sieve in the near future, using the Cyrus IMAP server instead of Dovecot, which I’ve been very happy with.

Is that the time? OK, maybe I’ll have to write that patch for Maildrop on Saturday.

This morning, at work, I’ve had a quiet moment so I thought I would open up my notebook and look at some code. When I woke it up, there was Konqueror (I was upgrading blogs last night). So, I thought, oh, let’s look at the list of plug-in directories. There was an entry for /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/wrapped/ which doesn’t exist, but not one for the /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/ directory, which does. I added an entry for /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/, clicked the Scan for New Plugins button and restarted Konqueror.

That’s all it took. It works.

Now, I just have to go file a bug report with a fix in their bugzilla. I love Free & Open Source Software.

This year, I’m not doing any presentation. I have some ideas for next year.

I will be running the keysigning party on Friday, October 9 at 7:15pm at the conference. I’m stepping into doing this a bit last minute, so we’re going to provide some additional info and the instructions for the keysigning party on the UTOSC website should be updated very soon.

To participate, just show up. If you want help generating a key pair and getting started, there will be several people there who can assist you, just be sure to bring your own notebook computer. If you have keys, please, email me your full key ID (not a short or medium) at keysigning@openbrainstem.net. It is a good idea to digitally sign that email. If you have multiple keys, include them all. I actually have three separate keys these days and 2 of them have multiple IDs associated with them.

(and PGP) allow us to digitally sign messages (usually email, but can be used with other communications systems, too), code and other documents. It also let’s us encrypt files, emails and just about anything else. This is an extremely important technology for a lot of reasons, some of which I’ve discussed in past articles on this blog (and others). Defending our privacy and ensuring the integrity of our personal, family and business communications is vital. We sign each other’s keys to build a “web of trust.” This is the critical step that makes the whole thing usable.

If you have never used PGP or GPG (a.k.a. GnuPG, Gnu Privacy Guard) before, visit the GnuPG website for a basic description of how to generate your key pair.

If you have never participated in a keysigning party, check out the Keysigning Party HOWTO and/or [ http://keysigning.org/ ].

Immediately following the Utah Open Source Conference 2007 keysigning party, I wrote a simple script to help help you sign-lots-o-keys. You can download the script from [ http://www.openbrainstem.net/download/sign-lots-o-keys ]. If I have time before the keyparty in just two days, I have some little updates that I would like to implement in that script. But don’t hold your breath. Perhaps there will be time at the conference on Saturday?

So, please, plan on joining us on Friday. These are always good fun.

When I first built it in May of 2004, Fedora Core 2 was barely out and was the first Fedora to sport an AMD64 (x86_64) 64-bit version. That was the first and last time that I installed Linux on this box, from scratch. Since then, I’ve upgraded it to FC3, FC4, FC5, F6, F7, F8 and now F9 (I will upgrade to F10 in a week or so).

When I installed FC2, I used the ext3 filesystem for the root volume (I use LVM). I "converted" the root volume to the XFS filesystem on 2006/08/03. I also created a few volumes using XFS and reiserfs (v3.6) filesystems.

Over time, I’ve had a few minor problems with XFS. Recently, those problems grew in regards to the root volume to the point where I needed to convert it to something else, which I did the other day. The root volume is now on reiserfs. That leaves just 3 volumes that are still XFS.

After upgrading to F9 and installing updates, there were a couple of weird issues that I was dealing with. I also kept seeing some filesystem corruption messages (on the terminal, in the logs) for XFS volumes (but they don’t tell you which one). That’s it, I’m done with this XFS thing, so I’m going to convert those filesystems over to something else and get rid of XFS on this workstation.

The three volumes are for /usr/, /var/ and /var/log/. I could just drop to single user mode and convert /var/ and /var/log/ without any difficulty. For whatever reason, on Fedora and derivatives (including RHEL, CentOS, etc.), I have never been able to umount /usr/ successfully once it’s mounted. So, I’m using a rescue environment (to convert all 3) like I did for the root filesystem conversion, just so I don’t have to muck with it.

I haven’t had one problem at all with the two XFS volumes I have on my home file server (one for /music/ and one for /video/). That server is running openSUSE for a few years now. It’s also a much more complicated setup on that hardware, which I’ll talk about more in a later article.

For those who want to post comments that I’m an idiot for using reiserfs, please, don’t bother. I’ve heard every reason why this filesystem or that filesystem sucks and you should only use, “the other one,” instead. Look, it’s this simple: since the filesystem is the one piece of software where we just don’t tolerate buggy software, when something does go wrong the stories live on for years. I’ve heard horror stories of kinds that you might never be able to imagine describing data loss at the hands of ext2, ext3, reiserfs, XFS, JFS and many other filesystems. I’ve only experienced data loss with ext2 and ext3. XFS has given me problems, but thankfully not with files that I couldn’t easily replace. I haven’t hardly used JFS, but I do have a volume or two on my home file server that are JFS and there’s been zero trouble there.

Here’s my philosophy about filesystem type selection: use the right tool for the job.

It’s not always easy to say with perfect definitiveness that you should always use this filesystem here and that one there. Benchmarks show all 4 of ext3, reiserfs, JFS and XFS as having statistically equal performance for general use cases (like workstations). There are some rules by which I can say, from experience, that one of these will outperform the others for a particular use. I’ve been meaning to run another series of performance benchmarks on as many viable Linux filesystem types as I can. I’ll post results and talk about use cases then. For now, here are some basic tips from my experiences:

• Always check the “expiration date” on the horror stories that people tell you. It’s more likely to be old, as reiserfs, ext3, JFS and XFS have all been quite stable for many years now.
• ext3 will almost never outperform the others for a specialized task.
• reiserfs, JFS and XFS will almost always have roughly equal performance for most specialized tasks. This is primarily due to the fact that they share the very similar basic filesystem design concepts, though, obviously, the implementations vary. I’ve thought for many years that XFS was derived, in part, from reiserfs (due to some very hard to discount coincidences in XFS structures and code) but also shares some design elements in common with MacOS filesystems.
• If you’re going to have lots of files, big or small, then move away from ext3. Newer versions of ext3 (that are not backward compatible with older ext2/3 drivers) implemented some features (like hash-indexing) from reiserfs in order to improve performance in this area. Still, more than about one thousand files or so in a directory and ext3 starts to bog down quickly (when working in that directory). So, for example, ext3 is a really poor choice for spooling directories on busy servers or for proxy stores or any other application where tens if not hundreds of thousands of files will be created.
• ext3 has the worst file deletion performance of the group. Thus, for applications like print and mail servers, ext3 is a very poor choice. I have personally seen anywhere from 7 to 9 times better performance for print servers and from 10 to 23 times better performance for mail servers by simply converting the spool (and log, in the case of the mail servers) directories from ext3 to reiserfs.
• XFS and JFS have some specialized features that are very useful in high throughput applications. XFS has a bandwidth guarantee feature that is very useful with large media operations (like audio/video editing, compositing, etc.) and streaming. JFS has some sustained high throughput features that provide excellent performance for some types of databases (not database servers, but data operations by the servers).
• When it comes to databases, it’s very hard to predict which of these 4 will provide the best performance. It is very rare that ext3 is the winner, but it does happen. The only way to really know has been to create 4 volumes formatted with each filesystem type and run some benchmarks against the same DB on top of them. If you’re going to do this, make sure to use the database structures for the DB you want to test that you will be using in production. You don’t have to have “real” data, but make sure it is representative of the types and sizes of records that your database will be working with. Also, be sure the benchmarking test run “real” queries in the “right” ratios that you do (or expect to) see in your production environment. After all of that testing, you’ll probably see that one of the filesystem types outshines the rest.

Once, while I was consulting with a Fortune 500 company that will remain nameless, we saw that certain tables experienced huge performance benefits on one filesystem and other tables were significantly better on another. They actually reworked the application code to work with splitting the database into two databases, that were then stored on two different filesystems in order to take advantage of this.

Basically, each of these filesystem types have their advantages and disadvantages. There are other journalling and log filesystems available for Linux that are worth looking at for some applications. If you have a strong bias towards just one filesystem type and won’t even look at the others, then you are very likely missing out some benefits that you could have. If nothing else, it’s certainly an interesting topic … to some of us geeks.

Of course, it’s very important to have good, strong password security practices. If you have poor passwords, none of this will matter, as you’ve probably already been compromised whether you know it or not. This means that all users have to have strong passwords. Techniques for helping users to create and use strong passwords are beyond the scope of this article, but I will write about these things in the near future.

Here’s the configuration that I put into place. I’m showing this as the the iptables commands that you would run on the command line, adapt to however you persist your Netfilter configuration. Also note that these lines should replace anything that you now have in there for SSH. I’m also including the additional ESTABLISHED,RELATED rule here for completeness:

# iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
# iptables -A INPUT -i $OUTSIDE_INTERFACE -p tcp --sport $UNPRIV_PORTS --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 10 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
# iptables -A INPUT -i $OUTSIDE_INTERFACE -p tcp --sport $UNPRIV_PORTS --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set -j ACCEPT

These three rules mean:

1. Accept traffic for “conversations” that are already in progress. This rule works for traffic in both directions and will handle everything in the ongoing connection.
2. If an IP packet matches these criterion:
   1. “-A INPUT -i $OUTSIDE_INTERFACE” — coming in on the Internet connetion (I create a variable with the value “eth0” or whatever it is and use that in my firewalling scripts);
   2. “-p tcp” — carry TCP (for Layer 4) in the IP packet payload;
   3. “--sport $UNPRIV_PORTS” — coming from an unprivileged TCP port (legitmate clients should only come from source ports 1024 through 65535, inclusive);
   5. “--dport 22 — destined for TCP port 22;
   6. “-m state --state” — the state module doesn’t have a record of this packet as being part of an existing connection;;
   7. “-m recent --update --seconds 10” — the update module has a record of another connection attempt matching this one within the past 10 seconds.

   Take these actions:

   1. “-j REJECT” — throw the packet away;
   2. “--reject-with icmp-host-prohibited” — return an ICMP host-prohibited response to the client who tried to initiate this connection.
3. The last rule is essentially the same as the second, except for:
   1. “-m recent --set” — make a note of the time that this connection attempt occurs at;
   2. “-j ACCEPT” — if all criterion match, accept the packet (which will stop further rule processing here, BTW).

Basically, what we’re trying to do here is to limit the number of failed connection attempts that are allowed.

Let’s say that human being tries to connect via ssh lamont.example.com and they don’t have an account or the mis-type their password several times to the point where sshd cuts off the connection, so they re-run their ssh command to try again. It will probably work and let them in, as it probably took them longer than 10 seconds from the first packet of the first TCP connection until the first packet of the next TCP connection.

However, the cracker-bot-nets don’t work like humans. They automate the process of trying to connect as fast as they can, so they will try only 1 or maybe as many as 3 or 4 passwords before closing the TCP connection and starting another. Since they don’t have to be as slow as people, they’ll usually be coming back again in under the 10 seconds. Most of them actually try to establish multiple connections (2-20ish at a time) in order to try more passwords.

Once the crack-bot starts seeing TCP connection failures, they usually skip your IP and go on to try and find softer targets. If they can’t connect to SSH, then why bother wasting time trying.

After setting up this configuration and letting it run for a week, I can report that it works marvelously. I’m getting under 10 break-in attempts per day, now. If you’re going to have SSH visible to the world (and why shouldn’t you?), then I would recommend adopting these Netfilter rules in your firewall configuration.

I’ve run into trouble here and there as the Livna folks keep pulling RPMs from their repos for older versions of the kernels. At the very least, they should leave the kmod-* packages in there for the original kernels that shipped with each release. Then, people can install a release and get a good driver. I had to wait for about 3 weeks after I first put F7 on my home workstation (dual AMD Opteron) before I could get the nVidia driver from Livna because they didn’t have one for the older kernel packages and the newer kernels weren’t booting (turned out to be malformed initrd files, which I later fixed).

Yes, I understand that they take up some disk space, but it’s not really that much perhaps 100M per release to keep all kmod-* packages and their dependencies around.

Livna, if you’re listening, please, give us all the driver packages and don’t remove them. You don’t know which kernels are working for people and which aren’t, so you could really be making things pretty difficult for people.

I have a Logitech bluetooth mouse that travels with me. I use it with my notebook computer, as I’m very, very not fond of trackpads. My favorite is the “TrackPoint” or “Eraser-head” mouse built into the keyboard, but this notebook didn’t come with one. Supposedly, I can buy a replacement keyboard from HP that includes the eraser-head pointer, but I have not yet done so.

When I wrote about installing Fedora 7 on this notebook (and now installing Fedora 8), one thing which I never documented was how I got the bluetooth mouse working with Linux (under F7). Now that I installed F8 from scratch, I need to set it up again.

When I installed F7, I spent hours dog-paddling through Google searches and horrible documentation and still hadn’t figured it out. Then, my friend and co-worker, Clint Savage (a.k.a. Herlo) popped into the office. It was him! He’s the one who has the exact same mouse as I do; I knew I’d seen it somewhere before I had bought mine. So, I asked him. He smiled and laughed, saying, “Not finding much useful documentation out there, eh?” He’d been through the same thing as me. He was impressed with how far I’d gotten through that process and estimated that I was probably 1-3 hours away from finding it myself, if I continued to follow the pattern he had. Well, he shared the information with me.

The good news was that it was pretty easy to get my bluetooth mouse talking with my bluetooth equipped notebook, just not really documented anywhere that one could point to just one thing (boy, I wish I’d documented those commands in a blog post; I’ll see if I can do just that next week, when I’m back at the office). The bad news was that one of them had to be run every time he started his computer. So, I put that command into a /root/bin/connect-to-my-bluetooth-mouse (or something like that) script. Then, a week later, I forgot to run that when I booted up and logged in, once, but was using the mouse anyway. I had discovered that it wasn’t necessary to run that all the time.

One of the reasons that it had been so difficult to setup bluetooth on Fedora 7 was that I was using GNOME on that installation. I stuck with entirely GNOME apps (except for Kdevelop) the entire time I had F7 on this notebook. Now that I have F8, I’ve gone back to KDE, which makes life so much better for me. GNOME still doesn’t have much bluetooth support and what is there is still very early half-baked and non-usable, for the most part. KDE’s bluetooth tools, on the other hand, seem much more comprehensive and “just work” for me.

It doesn’t stop with just anaconda installation and yum update commands, either. Almost every yum install command that I run decides to install both 64-bit and 32-bit packages. That is, unless I explicitly specify that I only want the 64-bit for each and every package. For example:

# yum install foo.x86_64 bar.x86_64

Why is yum doing this? It didn’t used to. I started experiencing this a little bit on FC6, but F7 and F8 both have horrific troubles with it. I need to do some more digging through Red Hat’s Bugzilla bug/issue tracking system, however, my first pass didn’t find anything to help explain the changes. After a little more research, I’ll file this as a bug.

In the meantime, here’s a quick-n-dirty hack I put together to run updates. The first step is to capture the output of yum update to a file (be patient, this command can take for-freakin-ever to run). Step two is to run the update itself. Here it is as a shell script:

#/bin/bash
# Get a temporary file to use.
TO_UPDATE="$(mktemp)"

# Populate the temporary file with the list of available updates.
yes n | yum update > ${TO_UPDATE}

# Composite an update command that does not include any 32-bit stuff.
yum update $(for i in $(sed '/i[3456]86/d' ${TO_UPDATE} |
         sed '/^Updating/d' |
         sed '/^Installing/d' |
         grep -v "^$" |
         grep -v replacing |
         cut -d" " -f2); do
      rpm -q --qf "%{name}.%{arch}\n" $i; done |
   grep -v "is not installed$")

# Optional cleanup.
if [ "${1}" = "-k" ]; then
   mv ${TO_UPDATE} /root/$(date --iso-8601)-$(basename ${TO_UPDATE})
else
   rm ${TO_UPDATE}
fi

You will have to run a separate yum update command for any 32-bit stuff you really do have installed and want to update.

I know this could be streamlined (especially the part that constructs the yum update command), but as I’m not planing on making this a permanent fix, I’m just not going to bother with it right now. Still, feel free to comment or trackback with other solutions or optimizations of mine.

My HP Compaq 6715b notebook comes with ATI Radeon X1270 video 128MB RAM dedicated plus 192MB RAM shared) and a 1680×1050 resolution 15.4 inch LCD (at 61Hz, it would seem). I’ve installed the proprietary ATI driver in order to get it working, as Fedora’s tools get really confused about widescreen setups, it would seem.

Here are the relevent package versions:

# rpm -qa | egrep '(fglrx|kernel)'
kmod-fglrx-8.42.3-8.lvn8
kmod-fglrx-2.6.23.1-49.fc8-8.42.3-8.lvn8
xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.42.3-7.lvn8.1
kernel-devel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8
kernel-devel-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
kernel-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
kernel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8
kernel-headers-2.6.23.1-49.fc8
xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs-32bit-8.42.3-7.lvn8.1

(As you can see, I haven’t removed the original kernel, yet. Maybe I’ll go do that now.)

However, I seem to be getting some fairly odd artifacts on-screen with this driver under F8, including some odd extra sprite garbage with the mouse cursor. I had experienced some oddities under F7, but they were confined to GNOME applications (no others exhibited any issues). It doesn’t matter if I enable or disable “Desktop Effects” either (they won’t successfully enable, anyway). A RAM test (memtest86+) shows that there’s nothing wrong with the system memory, but that doesn’t test the video card. There are ATI tools for testing the video card more fully, but I haven’t had time to try them out, yet.

Since FC6, Fedora systems rely on the X server detecting proper monitor and other configuration parameters every time it starts. This has been far less than reliable on a wide variety of machines that I’ve been running into over the past year. I’d like to get some more information about other people’s experiences with this, before I file a “bug” report about this. It’s really becoming an embarrassing problem as things worked much better when we would get a finished configuration file by default in FC5 and earlier.

First, I tried to do an “Upgrade Install”, which didn’t surprise me by not working. Upgrading from 32-bit F7 to 64-bit F8 isn’t something that anaconda knows how to do, and I didn’t expect it would. Still, I tried it and know we know for sure. So, I did a fresh installation. I removed the root Logical Volume (I’ve been using LVM for my notebooks and workstations since long before Fedora started to default to it) and created new LVs for / and /usr/ LVs. Previously, under F7, /usr/ was on the root LV.

The install phase itself went just fine. 1478 packages were installed, including 389 32-bit (i.e. i386, i486, i586 and/or i686 RPMs). I ran a simple command to find and then remove all of them:

# rpm -qa --qf "%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" | grep "\.i[3456]86$" | xargs rpm -e

If I need any 32-bit stuff later, I’ll just reinstall as few such packages as are required.

My next issue was the same video problem as I had when I installed Fedora 7. The graphical installer couldn’t run and the resulting system had no working X server configuration. This was very easy to fix:

# wget http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
# rpm -qp --qf "%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" livna-release-8.rpm
livna-release-8-1.noarch
# mv livna-release-8.rpm livna-release-8-1.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh livna-release-8-1.noarch.rpm

(NOTE: I renamed the package file back to what it should have been in the first place. Though rare, if they update it, I’d like to notice the difference and be sure I’m using the latest one on some other machine in the future.)

After setting up the Livna repository for Fedora 8, I was able to install and activate the ATI driver:

# yum install kmod-fglrx x11-xorg-drv-fglrx
. . . output omitted . . .
# fglrx-config-display enable

Notice that the command name changed from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8; it used to be ati-fglrx-config-display.

The next thing I need to fix is to re-associate my Logitech Bluetooth mouse with the notebook. I had a script in /root/bin/ that would have taken care of that very easily. Unfortunately, I forgot about that until after I had installed Fedora 8, thus obliterating that file. Oh, well. This time, I’ll also document it elsewhere (perhaps here?) once I get it figured out again. I hope that will be tonight.

One last thing; with Fedora 7, I did my very best to stick with an all GNOME system. It was very irritating using applications that just couldn’t handle lots of basic things that I take for granted using other apps (mostly KDE). For Fedora 8, I’m going back to KDE, where things work much better.

Though I haven’t had a chance to try it out, yet, this is exciting news. It’s wonderful to see a game like this take the step to providing Linux, and Mac clients. Given that Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Vista is such a horrible platform and provides terrible performance for games, it would be a very good for many game makers to put more effort into both Mac and Linux support. In case you hadn’t heard, Apple (AAPL) sold 2 million iMac systems in 2007Q3 alone. There is talk that they could top that number in Q4 with ease.

Blizzard, are you listening? How about providing a LInux version of World of WarCraft and StafCraft II (whenever it lands)? That would be awesome.

I’m posting the script, which is still very rough, as I didn’t both taking any time when I whipped it up last night to take care of everything that it really should be doing. Still, I’ll work on it here and there, I’m sure. You can download it from http://www.openbrainstem.net/download/sign-lots-o-keys. If you feel like makeing some fixes, either post your patches (please, create them as a unified diff file, if you wouldn’t mind) and put a link in the comments here and/or on your own blog.

Enjoy!

I’ve been needing to get a new notebook for the past two years, but I kept putting it off because of time, money and that one more feature that’s coming out in a couple of months. With the arrival of so many new notebooks in the office, I decided to look again and dream about a new one of my own, so I made the rounds looking at systems of interest, including a couple of HP notebooks, the ThinkPad and Apple’s MacBook Pro.

When I hit HP’s Small & Medium Business website, I noticed the one category of notebooks which I had always left unexplored (as they didn’t fit some of the criteria I look for) listed that there were models which had up to 16 hours of battery life. I was curious to see what they had in this “Balanced Mobility” category, so I took a look. Boy, am I glad I did.

I found the HP Compaq 6715b. They had (at this writing, I think it’s still on) a pre-packaged deal going for US$1,129 (Ed: The price is lower, now) with:

• AMD Turion64 X2 (dual core) at 2.0GHz
• 1GB RAM
• 160GB SATA hard drive
• ATI Radeon Mobility X1270 video chip (with 128MB dedicated RAM and using 192MB shared RAM)
• 15.4 inch WSXGA+ (1680×1050) LCD
• Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet NIC
• Broadcom 4321 802.11 a/b/g/draft-n wireless NIC & integrated bluetooth
• Fingerprint reader
• 4 USB 2.0, 1 IEEE1394 (firewire), 6-in-1 card reader (actually, all SD type form factors), 1 Type I/II PC-card slot

That’s a lot of notebook for the money. So I put in an order. HP estimated that it would ship on the 30th of August, but it arrived on Thursday morning (2007/08/23).

In fact, I believe it’s around half the price of what any of the other guys have paid for their ThinkPad notebooks and it’s almost the same. They got a wireless USB 2.0 capability which I don’t have, but they only have 3 USB 2.0 ports (I have 4). Most (if not all) of their screens are 15.4 inch WUXGA (1920×1200) with nVidia graphics (256MB), an Intel Core 2 Duo (2.0GHz or 2.2GHz, I’m not sure which in all cases) and they have a nice “eraser-head” mouse which I don’t have, but really love. I hate trackpads, so I just picked up a Logitech bluetooth mouse, Saturday.

Overall, I think I got a better deal. My processor is as good or even a little faster than the ThinkPads’, and otherwise there’s very little difference in the equipment between the two, but they paid quite a bit more than I did for the HP. Thanks to that savings, I also picked up a 12-cell “Ultra Capacity” battery for my new notebook, which attaches to the underside at the back, causing the system to sit at a slight incline. The Ultra Capacity battery mounts in addition to the standard battery that came with the notebook and gives this machine up to 16 hours of battery life, with only a small increase in weight but a little more comfort and room for airflow underneath. We’ll have to wait and see just how much life I really get out of this setup, but I shan’t fear attempting to watch 3-4 movies on an international flight.

I’ve installed Fedora 7 on it. When I booted up the box to do the install, anaconda couldn’t get X to run, so it offered me the choice of using the text-mode installer or of starting VNC for me. I went with a VNC install. The resulting system had a couple of things to fix up. I checked on http://linux-laptops.net/ but this model isn’t listed, yet.

I believe there must have been a bug (I didn’t bother to go looking in Red Hat’s Bugzilla for it) in the version of YUM that shipped with F7 (32-bit) as yum update kept corrupting the RPM db and then deleting the errata RPM files as it thought it had installed packages but actually hadn’t. I simply edited /etc/yum.conf and set keepcache=1 before re-running yum again. That way, the packages stuck around and then I installed as many as I could using rpm instead (including an updated YUM package), which required me to fix the RPM DB, first. This was easy to do by simply running rm /var/lib/rpm/__*; rpm --rebuilddb and waiting for just 1 minute for it to finish. After installing the updated YUM package, all yum commands have worked perfectly for me.

To “fix” the X server configuration, I simply added the livna YUM repo to my new system and ran yum install kmod-fglrx followed by ati-fglrx-display enable as root (that’s not the command mentioned in the Unofficial Fedora FAQ for FC6, but the F7 version of the UFAQ wasn’t up yet) and the X server worked perfectly, even running the screen at it’s full, native resolution by default. I’ll have to see about running Cedega for a couple of games.

Next, I tried to get the fingerprint reader working, but so far, I’ve had no luck. Honestly, I haven’t really tried all that hard, yet. Some quick Google searches have only found references to people who haven’t gotten other HP notebooks’ fingerprint readers to work, but I also found some “hints” that others have. The output of the lsusb command showed Bus 003 Device 003: ID 08ff:2580 AuthenTec, Inc., which is the fingerprint reader.

I haven’t gotten the Broadcom 4321 802.11a/b/g/draft-n working yet. Linux does come with a driver that supposedly covers the chip in this Mini-PCI card, but I do not have the firmware for the driver to load. The tools for these cards come with a program called fw-cutter, but I haven’t found a file for this card that it will work on, yet. I suspect that I will have to wait for an update to fw-cutter to be able to get this working under the Linuxdriver . Perhaps I can find time to try to help patch it. In the meantime, my good old Cisco airo 350 card works fine, but I could also use NDIS Wrapper to run it with a Windows driver.

I’ve only been using this notebook for less than a day (and only a small part of the day, at that). Even so, I’m very happy with it already.

I’m thinking of installing Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, probably) on here alongside of Fedora. I’ve been wanting to learn more about that distro and now I have a hard drive that’s more than large enough for me to play with such things.

I also added vga=0x31a to the kernel line in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file (yeah, yeah, I know how Red Hat/Fedora only folks are going to say the file is “supposed” to be /boot/grub/grub.conf, but it really isn’t so; so, please, don’t add comments telling me about that). That sets up a framebuffer mode for text that’s 1280×1024. I don’t know if the kernel can support a 1680×1050 mode or not (so far, I’m not finding anything that would make thik it does). If so, I’d sure like to find out the right code for it. If not, I’d like to figure out how to add wide-screen friendly modes to the kernel framebuffer driver(s), as more and more systems are going that way.

I’m going to post this system on the http://linux-laptops.net/ website. If anyone else figures out how to get the fingerprint reader working under Linux on this or any other notebook that uses the same fingerprint reader chip/device, please, either TrackBack to this post or leave me a comment.

So, I used KTorrent to download the DVD ISO for the x86-64 version of openSUSE 10.2, which I let run overnight (3.7GB takes a little while on a T1 line). I verified the MD5SUM on the ISO file and tried to use cdrecord to burn the image to a blank DVD. 865MB in, ka-blooey. A write error meant I had a Frisbee (or coaster, if you prefer). “OK, well that could just be one bad disc,” so I tried again. Same thing. “OK, perhaps if I turn the burn speed down,” but I now have 3 discs with ~865MB burned on them.

So, I installed k3b and tried to burn from the DVD image with that. It worked like a charm.

I’m not sure what switches k3b used, but it did run growisofs before starting the burn process. I’m not sure whether that was important or not. The cool thing is, this is an example of a frontend that is done right. With k3b, all sorts of burning situations are just handled. It will work with all sorts of disc burning and image related tools, can use transcode when creating audio or “MP3″ CDs, has DVD aware support and so much more.

I’ll quote the part he quoted and intersperse it with my comments.

Today Oracle announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes.

Sound like what CentOS and White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL) do. OK, that’s fine.

Currently, Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software.

Wrong.

Red Hat provides seven (7) years of support from the release date of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) release (since RHEL3, only 5 years for RHEL2.1), including the production of errata packages for both security and bug fixes. This means that support, including updates, will not be terminated until after October 2010 for RHEL3 and February 2012 for RHEL4.

This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed.

Wrong.

However, it is true that Red Hat does not backport drivers or other new feature support to released versions.

Oracle’s new Unbreakable Linux program …

Oracle’s “Unbreakable Linux” program has been around for years. Perhaps, they meant to convey that this new incarnation of the (existing) Unbreakable Linux program, which now includes an Oracle branded Linux distribution.

… will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems.

Thus implying that Linux is backwater, until Oracle steps in and makes it acceptable. Sounds like big software company marketting people to me :) .

Oracle is offering its Unbreakable Linux program for substantially less than Red Hat currently charges for its best support.

Given that Red Hat has support option from nothing (no support contract is required) or pay-per-incident phone support up to 24×7 on-site Red Hat employees managing your systems with a couple dozen options in between, “best support” could mean a lot of things.

Of course, tons of people get confused easily by Red Hat’s “licensing” costs. No! They are not charging you for a license. Everything in RHEL is free and open. You can buy both a support contract and/or (a) subscription(s) to Red Hat Network (RHN).

“We believe that better support and lower support prices will speed the adoption of Linux,

Well, duh!

… and we are working closely with our partners to make that happen,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Intel is a development partner. Dell and HP are resellers and support partners. Many others are signed up to help us move Linux up to mission critical status in the data center.

I’ve got news for you Oracle, Linux is already mission critical in lots of data centers, including yours. That’s right, Oracle has been using Linux as the platform for delivery of their hosted applications services for years. I am also personally familiar with enough Fortune 500 companies data centers to say that they all have at least one of their mission-critical applications running on Linux. But don’t take my word for it; almost all of them have made public statements in some form or another which indicate that this is the case.

Please, will you folks stop treating Linux like something you are coming along to save from “certain self doom”. You’re not. Most of you are, on the other had, making wonderful contributions, but all of our Linux are not belong to you.

Although this last one isn’t really that big of a deal, it’s yet another example of how marketing people in companies that should know better keep implying that Linux isn’t ready for “real world” workloads.

BTW: I’m sitting in a lousy hotel room in Austin, Texas with NyQuil in my system, feeling sick and extremely drowsy. Maybe I should post while in this state, but I’m doing it anyway (isn’t that one of the corollary definitions of “stupid”?). So, if I messed up a detail or a link, please, let me know, but bear with me. Also, I only have Internet access in the evenings, if it’s working (took a couple of hours to get a stable connection tonight). I’ve gotta go sleep now. I sure hope I don’t feel this crappy, tomorrow. Goodnight.

Saturday, after I was home I had tried to access some files on the file server and couldn’t. I tried to log into it via SSH and that hung. I logged in as root on it’s console without problems. A df worked fine, but trying to access anything mounted from the new drive’s LVs failed, hanging the command indefinitely. Trying to shutdown the box also failed as it hung on trying to unmount those volumes. I used the good-ol-power-switch to kill it, waited for everything to stop spinning and tried to start it up. The drive controller can’t even make sense of the drive. I simply powered the box down and left it that way for the weekend.

Tonight, I’ll be pulling the new drive out. I’ll hook it up to my home workstation (only other SATA box I currently have) and see if the drive will run. If so, I’m still not putting it back in the server. Instead, I’ll verify everything, wipe it and run it hard to try to fail it again. Even if I can’t get it to fail again, I’m still going to get an RMA and have it replaced. I think I’ll grab 1 or 2 more while I’m at it and set up either RAID 1 or RAID 5.

Let the hard drive games begin, I guess.

X applications do not open sometimes: this is caused because DHCP is set to “change hostname on DHCP” requests. For some reason X applications are not happy with changes in the hostname. I have no idea why. I personally have not experienced this, but I guessed that it was DHCP changing the host name.

Solution: Make sure that your network setting does not change the hostname. I have no idea why this happens, but this is what happens. Just do not let DHCP change your hostname.

He was right. The X server uses the machine name of the box it’s running on as part of the filename for some socket files (in /tmp/) that allow local apps to connect to the X server. If you change the systems hostname during a running X session, any X apps you launch thereafter will use the new hostname to look for an appropriate socket and not find one.

The fix for getting into this situation is easy; just kill the X session and log in again. Trying to “gracefully” log out of such an X session will probably fail, as the logout dialog box applet can’t be launched. Press <ctrl>+<alt>+<backspace> (all together) to kill your current X session. A new display manager should be started in it’s place.

I haven’t tried it with any handheld browsers, so if you do, please, post a comment about the results.

Anyway, sites like that are yet another reason why I love Konqueror. It took just 10 seconds to tell Konqueror to pretend to be Firefox 1.0 (on Linux, of course) whenever it connects to “hilton.com”. Presto! No trouble at all. In fact, the whole site renders perfectly.

I’ve seen people talking about the Linux version of Google Earth on the SLLUG Members mailing list. I found an entry on the Fedora SELinux mailing list titled, “Step-by-Step Guide To Creating SELinux Policy for Google Earth“. I’ve seen several other people talking about it already.

But, I was surprised to see that no one whose feed is picked up by the Utah Open Source Planet had yet posted on any of their blogs. So, here it is.

I heard about the new Linux version of Google Earth from my good friend, Evan McNabb via Jabber, yesterday. I downloaded the new Linux version and waited until later in the evening to try it out. Video was a bit scan like on my notebook, but I soon cleared it up.

I’d like to see people comment on their experiences with it, so far. I’ll write more about the things I hear later on.

openbrainstem-announce:              "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-admin:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-confirm:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-join:         "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-leave:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-owner:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-request:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-subscribe:    "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe openbrainstem-announce"
openbrainstem-announce-unsubscribe:  "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe openbrainstem-announce"

What I was missing was to add these kinds of entries to the /etc/postfix/virtual_alias file:

openbrainstem-announce@openbrainstem.net              openbrainstem-announce
openbrainstem-announce-admin@openbrainstem.net        openbrainstem-announce-admin
openbrainstem-announce-bounces@openbrainstem.net      openbrainstem-announce-bounces
openbrainstem-announce-confirm@openbrainstem.net      openbrainstem-announce-confirm
openbrainstem-announce-join@openbrainstem.net         openbrainstem-announce-join
openbrainstem-announce-leave@openbrainstem.net        openbrainstem-announce-leave
openbrainstem-announce-owner@openbrainstem.net        openbrainstem-announce-owner
openbrainstem-announce-request@openbrainstem.net      openbrainstem-announce-request
openbrainstem-announce-subscribe@openbrainstem.net    openbrainstem-announce-subscribe
openbrainstem-announce-unsubscribe@openbrainstem.net  openbrainstem-announce-unsubscribe

After running postmap and /etc/init.d/postfix reload, it works. :)

The really odd thing is that I wasn’t even looking at this stuff, I wasn’t working on my mail server and it just occured to me how to fix the error, out of the blue. So, I sat down and tried it. I only wish inspiration had struck me when I was first setting this up.

As you might know from reading my recent post, this past week, my wife Charlotte and I have cleared out our storage unit. One of the items that I have long been wanting to get out of there and get set up is my desk. It’s a not too large, but well shaped “half-C” desk, with a very deep center area (perfect for my 20 inch Princeton Graphic systems Ultra 20 monitor, which weighs in at something like 80 pounds).

My main system these days has been my notebook computer. I almost never leave home without it. But when I am home, I spend a lot of time working with both the notebook and the other systems I have. So, I set up synergy this afternoon. I’m using the keyboard and mouse for my Dual Opteron workstation and writing this blog entry on the notebook. This is so cool.

Synergy is very easy to get setup and running. If you’re thinking of using Synergy, I would encourage you to do so.

The Fedora Extras repository has a synergy package (simply run “yum install synergy” on FC4 & FC5 systems), so installation was a snap. I created an /etc/synergy.conf file (have to do it from scratch) on the server and was up and running in under 5 minutes, that is, after fixing a semi-colon that should have been a colon.

The next thing I’m going to do with Synergy is try to get it running on my sgi Indigo 2 & Sun SPARCstation 10 workstations. If I feel like taking on a real challenge, I’ll see if I can get it working on my Apple Mac Quadra950 which is running A/UX (Apple UNIX).

It turns out that WordPress, the blogging software we use for OpenBrainstem Member Blogs, had a bug in it. In the piece of code that finds and converts “smiley” text to icons, it was using the wrong URL. It should have used the URL for the blog site, but instead was using the URL for the admin and authenticated users access (like login) site.

I’ve fixed the bug and will be sending a patch (it’s a one-liner) to the WordPress developers. Hopefully, it’s included in the next release.

1. I burned a complete set of bad discs. It looks like the burner in that box might be bad. Retrying a couple of the discs also produced bad results. The built-into-YaST media check failed on all discs, and trying to use readcd failed. The MD5SUMS of the .iso files were all good.
2. I had Dax burn discs on his notebook (mine has no burner :( ). These (mostly) worked to complete an installation, but readcd failed at the 3rd to last sector on all three. This makes us think that SUSE may have bungled when spinning the CDs. Also, one package on CD3 could not be read (myspell-american). All other packages were good.
3. I had Dax burn another CD3. This one could not be read to install the qscintilla package, but myspell-american and all other packages were fine.
4. We burned copies of the first Dax burned CD3 (with a failing myspell-american package) and gave them to the students.

Total time for the whole process: 6.5 hours.

Ugh! There went a whole day and no time for me to get lunch, either.

Don’t get me wrong. Overall, I like SUSE distributions. Sure, there are warts, but that’s true of every distro I’ve ever used. hey, things happen; and this was just one more.

Full Disclosure: I use Fedora on my notebooks and workstations, today. I also use SUSE on my home workstation. Most of my servers are CentOS. I will be installing OpenSUSE 10.1 on my notebook and start using it heavily, but I’ll probably dual-boot that with FC5.