Another Update

Well, so far I’m liking Openbox, but only as a WM. I still like the Desktop Management that Gnome provides, and as such I’ve layed out a new project for today (or this week, depending on how well all goes).

What I’d like to do, is use Arch Linux as the base, set up a minimal Gnome install on top of that, and have Openbox be the WM for Gnome. After I have that accomplished, I’m going to start installing apps, and making everything fit together universally (IE: KDE apps have the gnome look & feel). Hopefully, with the experience I have in Arch, this shouldn’t take me too long. Although, I do have to do a full disk encryption setup again, which means filling my 78G hard disk with random data.

So, other than doing an oil change on the Jeep, and my two four wheelers, this is most likely how I’m going to be spending the better part of my father’s day.

and to all you dads out there – Happy Father’s day :]

~Pikles~

It’s been a while

I’d been using Debian for a while, and because it was so stable I really had nothing to post…

I’m back to using Arch and the Open Source ATI drivers ;]

I configured pam_usb so if I remove a usb drive it locks the screen and if I plug it back in it unlocks the screen.

I’m using OpenBox (cuz I’m a bamf ;p)

I’m going to post a guide about this in a little while.

This post was just to remind everyone I’m still alive. haha.

Happy Dayz
Pikles

Debian Lenny – Stable as a rock

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, and I’ve realized, I used this blog on a lot of resumes, so updates are always nice. This update isn’t particularly interesting, no major bug fixes I’ve found, nothing terribly exciting and new. I just wanted to write a post this time giving kudos to the Debian team. They have released Lenny some time ago, and I must say, this is the MOST stable Operating System I’ve ever used. Even with Compiz and all it’s buggyness, and Avant-Window-Navigator, Lenny seems to have almost no crashes at all. I haven’t had a single ctrl+alt+bkspc moment, I haven’t rebooted my machine in almost a month, and I haven’t had any real application issues. Thanks a lot guys, this really is a pleasure to use.

Now onto my other news – I’m going to be putting Arch linux back on my laptop. Debian I will reserve for server use thanks to it’s amazing stability, Fedora and others I will still test out, and report their progress.

The last bit of news – I’m working on writing my own (P/U)IM (Personal or User Information Manager) – I hope to pick up where others have left off, and I’m hoping that within the next year or so I can release my code to the public.

Well, that’s really it for now, It’s almost 4:30am here, and I need to start my Arch install.

Happy Hacking
PiklesOnFire

Arch Linux – Another upgrade another breakage; sort of – Also – AMD/ATI drops support of newer graphics cards

Tech News:
For those of your reading this, my upgrade was a success (mostly).
I got the new kernel 2.6.29 and the new firmware. I upgraded the Xorg to the new 1.6.0, and upgraded it’s drivers. Now the bad news.
I know the new catalyst and catalyst-utils packages in the AUR requires you to have those upgrades, so I restarted into terminal mode (runlevel 3), removed the catalyst-old and catalyst-utils-old packages which I was using until this point. Then I tred to install the catalyst and catalyst-utils packages. It went through with no errors, and seemed to work. So I rebooted again, this time into graphical mode (runlevel 5). GDM failed to start (insert long list of obscenities being scremed here). Well, I removed a large chunk of my xorg.conf and ran “aticonfig –initial” (as root of course). This resulted in an unpleasant message saying that there were “no supported adapters detected”. Nice. Trying “start x” was just as useless giving me: “no screens found”

I googled around, it appears AMD is fucking up again (please note: I don’t swear in my tech blogs often, AMD just really has me pissed about this). AMD is dropping support for chipsets that are only a few years old in an effort to support future chipsets. This makes no sense to me. I mean, think about it, my computer has an ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 (regular Radeon x1400 users will have this issue too, just a side note). I bought this thing maybe three or four years ago. Now, all of a sudden, I’m forced to use drivers that aren’t on par (due to AMD/ATI, not the OS community mind you), or to buy a new graphics card for my laptop, OR to continue using outdated and buggy drivers. Heh – thanks AMD. Had I known how sucky AMD/ATI was going to be about supporting my graphics card, I NEVER would have bought this lappy from Dell. Now, I know, in the future go Nvidia or Intel (probably Nvidia for gaming and Intel for less intensive tasks).

Now for the fix. Simply reinstall the catalyst-old and catalyst-utils-old packages reboot, and everything will be fine. (I still have to use catalyst because neither xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd gives me a working compiz otherwise I’d say screw using anything from this chrap company)

At least now I see why Arch dropped support of catalyst and makes it sit in the AUR like a bad, bad, boy. I too am going to no longer support AMD/ATI. I’ve already been telling people to NOT buy any system that contains their video cards or processors, and I’m going to continue to do so. I say we as a community (Windows, BSD, Solaris, Linux, GNU: UNITE!) blackball AMD/ATI for a while. Let them see how much they are aggrivating people. By the way – This issue affects Windows users as well. AMD/ATI is removing support for the chipsets from your drivers as well *giggles because Windows users now feel the burn Linux users have been feeling*

If a company wants to screw its customers over this badly, I say let them, but when they get the shit kicked out of them by their competitors because of their poor choices, they know who to blame.

Anyways folks, that about sums it up for this post.
As always,
Happy Hacking
~PiklesOnFire

PS
AMD/ATI – GO SUCK A FAT ONE!

Arch Linux – Time to upgrade

Tech News:
Well, it’s time for the upgrade, all the packages are now in sync, the kernel26, kernel26-firmware, xorg, and all the xorg drivers. I’m still a little hesitant, I guess because I’m so used to Ubuntu botching a system when it comes to a major upgrade like this. I have faith though, and I’m holding out that Arch will not let me down.

I’ve rewritten my VERY basic backup script. It doesn’t have any checks or bounds, it only takes 3 command line paramaters, and it’s a very simple bash script. I know I could do a lot more with this, and I’m planning on it, even converting it to python, but for the time being, I find this is suitable for my needs to keep my system from totally failing when an update fails or when I (un)install something that breaks things. BTW -  that script will be posted after I upgrade my box. It uses Dar and gzip to accomplish the archiving and compression. Dar because it supports ACLs (Access Control Lists) and EAs (Extended Attributes), gzip because it gives a very good compression rate that doesn’t take too long to accomplish (vs bzip2, zip or lzma).
Note: I moved from tar to dar due to the fact that dar supports ACLs and I’m using XFS with ACLs. I reccomend that if your filesystem supports ACLs and EAs that you implement them, it’s an extra layer of security.

Blog News:
Wow, it seems a lot of people had issues with Debian Squeeze and the network-admin package, I got quite a few hits, and apparently (according to wordpress) the number one search leading to my page has been Debain squeeze network-admin. Like I said before, I just hope my post helped keep the issue from progressing to a number of Debian users (sorry guys, I’ve switched back to Arch but I’ll still be hanging out in your IRC channels too).

Well, that’s all for this very short entry. I’ll be posting back in about an hour or so after I complete the upgrade, and detail the steps I took to (hopefully) keep FGLRX (Catalyst) working.
Happy Hacking
~PiklesOnFire

Back to the Arch way

Tech News:
Well, I had a minor issue with Debian testing that pretty much left my entire system hosed. Luckily I had taken a backup just before the problem started, so I thought a simple restore would fix it. I popped in my recovery disk, and I started to mount all my Logical Volumes under the LUKS layer. Stupid me, being in a big hurry, I deleted the files off the wrong partition. I now had a hosed system and no /home, and no backup (it was being hosted on the /home partition). Well, It’s not like things were going smoothly under Debian any ways, right? So I decided to give Arch another shot. I tried the opensource ATI drivers (xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd), the ATI one gave me better results, where the radeonhd had some flickering and other issues. Neither one would allow Compiz to run though. So I tried the Catalyst drivers from the AUR, found out I needed the testing XServer and Kernel, no thanks. So I opted to use the older Catalyst driver “catalyst-old” from the AUR. It installed pretty quickly, I rebooted, and here I am, with full Compiz in action XD

Now that I have everything up and running, I wrote a new VERY simple backup script, which backs up my /home as well as the entire system and /boot using tar and gzip. It also takes an image of the MBR and keeps a small copy of that for us as well (just in case something ever happens).

Lesson I learned from all this: Don’t give up on a distro just because they drop support for your driver. Linux is a powerful thing, our community is amazing, and if something breaks, we all pitch in to fix it.
And don’t “rm -rf” any mounted partitions until your are 100% sure it’s the RIGHT partition.

PS – the new 2.6.29 kernel is out of the testing repo and is in the stable on Arch, I’m holding off on upgrading it though until the new XServer is out of testing as well, because this kernel breaks support for catalyst-old, and the new Catalyst (fglrx) in the AUR needs the testing version of the Xorg XServer, which I’m not fond of using things from testing unless I’m forced to.

Well, that’s all the news I have for now, happy hacking.
~PiklesOnFire

Debian Testing – System Tools is Back

Tech News:
As an update to yesterday, I’ve noticed several (25) new updates have been pushed on Debian testing (Squeeze), these updates have corrected the issue where the system-tools-backends was removing the gnome-system-tools and other packages.
I’m glad to see these updates were pushed so quickly. It should keep people from having any other issues. (all you need to do is run a apt-get update && apt-get upgrade).

On another note, I got the disk encryption to work flawlessly. It now doesn’t prompt for a password, but takes the key from a usb device. The only thing I have left to do as far as passwords goes, is I’d like to set up PAM_USB so that it unlocks my Gnome-Screensaver and logs me into GDM automatically using the same USB drive that I use for data encryption. I’m also going to be working on (very soon) a GUI for changing system password/encryption password/GPG password all at once. That’s another thing I’m hoping to have written very soon, at the very least I’d like to write up my skeleton for it tonight, so I know exactly what I want it to do before I start writing it (I have to write a backup script before anything).

Blog News:
I noticed that my tagging of my posts had been done incorrectly before, I corrected that and I’d like to say that this blog is slowly becoming more popular than my Opera one. I still need to port over the posts which I feel deserve the space here, and I still have a lot of work to do on my backup script. I’m going to write another post later about the framework for the script, a skeleton, something to guide me while I’m writing it. It should be pretty sweet, so keep a eye out for that. Also, I’m working on a script to start/stop services and such from the desktop; probably just a simple bash script, python if I’m feeling dangerous ;p. Also, I’ve decided that I’m going to try and include some new information on these posts, stories I find online about Linux or other operating systems, network news, vulnerabilities, viruses, etc.

Personal News:
<rant>On another note, I’d like to point out to anyone assisting in IRC channels, if someone is using a Linux distro that is not EXACTLY yours, but it is based on it, and they have a simple enough question, and our channel isn’t busy; get the hell over it. If we are near dead, and someone needs help, why shouldn’t they get it? Especially for issues that take something like 10 minutes to fix. Just because you have OP status on the channel doesn’t make you the Channel owner, and it is a far cry from the Server Admin. Banning people for asking for help in the wrong channel is a jackass move, it pisses myself and others off, and it’s just not a good way to get people to move to your distro.</rant> Sorry, personal rant there, and I HOPE THE OPS FROM #DEBIAN READ THIS.

Debian Testing – System tools breakage

Tech News:
As we know, I’m using Debian Testing (squeeze), well, today a set of updates came out that sort of “broke” things.
I was in the debian channel today and someone mentioned that they had an issues where they got the error message:

system-tools-backends: Breaks: gnome-system-tools (< 2.22.1-1) but 2.22.0-3 is to be installed

I kept thinking it was due to him using the experimental repository, because I personally stay up-to-date with updates on my box.
Yet, during my troubleshooting, I myself did an:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

On that last command “apt-get dist-upgrade”
I got a notice stating:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
fast-user-switch-applet gnome-network-admin gnome-system-tools
The following packages will be upgraded:
gimp gimp-data libgimp2.0 ntfs-3g poppler-utils python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed system-tools-backends tracker tracker-search-tool
tracker-utils


Long story short, we both had to manually download and install gnome-system-tools_2.22.1-2 from SID. After I did my update went fine without a hitch, and his install of GNOME continued as well.

Hopefully this post will provide people with a solution before they hit the issue.

As always,
Happy Hacking -
~PiklesOnFire

My Initial System – E1705 (9400)

As my first new post on a new blog site I feel it appropriate to say hello :]
Rather than introduce myself, I’d like to introduce my box (which is actually a notebook).

This post is to document the initial box. I’m hoping at some point to make a few upgrades (I’ve already upgraded the RAM to two gigs), but for now, this laptop is all I have to work with.

Specs for E1705:

• • OS: Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition Replaced w. Linux
  • Hard Drive: 80 GB SATA @ 7500RPM
  • Screen: 17″ (1920×1200)
  • Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 256 MB with HyperMemory
  • RAM: 1.0GB DDR2 SDRAM @533 MHz (2 x 512MB) Was upgraded to 2.0 Gb
  • Optical Drive: 8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/Double Layer Support
  • Battery: 6-cell lithium ion
  • Wireless: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11 b/g Mini Card (54 Mbps)
  • Weight: 7.94 lbs
  • Dimensions: 1.6″ (H) x 15.5 ” (W) x 11.3″ (D)
  • Ports/Slots: Digital Video Interface (DVI-D), 1 IEEE 1394 (FireWire), 6 Universal Serial Bus (USB 2.0), 5-in-1 removable memory card reader, VGA monitor out port, S-video out, RJ-45 Ethernet LAN, RJ-11 modem, ExpressCard 54mm, headphone/speaker jack, microphone connector

* Processor: Intel Yonah Core Duo T2500 (2.0GHz/2MB L2 Cache)

Output of Commands:
lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility X1400
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
03:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller
03:01.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19)
03:01.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 0a)
03:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 05)
03:01.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev ff)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)

With that out of the way, for the time being I have moved from Arch Linux, to Debian Testing (squeeze).
I have moved From Opera to Iceweasel.
And I have moved from Blogger to WordPress (Blog from there and My.Opera will be moved here).

As for the initial system, everything seems to be working fine under Debian GNU/Linux. The only exception to that is hibernation and suspend (could be due to the fact of an encrypted LVM setup).
More on this will come when I find a fix for it ;]

Happy Hacking,
PiklesOnFire