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GRAFFITI -- July 19, 2004 thru July 25, 2004>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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July 19, 2004
0733 - Good morning. Lots of fun... First up, it is really nice having my niece here. We haven't seen her for about 3 years, and she's bright, fun and pretty - must not be related to me after all. And she's grown up a lot... definitely different genes. Heh. Today we're off to the Washington Monument, and whatever else we decide to do down on the mall today. That'll put paid to Brian-the-tourist for the rest of the week, though. I'm not sure what the girls have planned for the balance of the days, but I'm sure shopping figures into the schedule somewhere.
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Above, a happy Lucy with her napping partner. They practiced their trade for a total of over 4 hours in two naps, on Saturday. Meantime, not resting at all, the Gladiolas are doing great in the front yard. I'm super-impressed.
Yesterday I installed SUSE/Novell Linux 9.1 Professional, from a community comp. kit I got from Novell. Overall, it remains the SUSE experience. There's precious little changed from the last two revisions, as far as I can tell. I can work with it, as I can with almost any distro, but there's nothing that stands out and says USE ME over one of the other good-enough ones. They don't have the solid, easy Windows networking integration that Xandros has. Here's an example of the sort of problem that distributions put you through: It auto-discovered the LaserJet 1100 here, announced by the CUPS server here on Goldfinger. But I couldn't print to it. It said the jobs went, but they never did. I experimented for a while, looked at log files, then wondered to myself? Does it need to resolve the name "goldfinger" in the cups definition stanza? After all, even though I run my own internal nameserver, I've not gotten around to putting my permanent machines in DNS there. So I put a /etc/hosts entry in for Goldfinger and boom... out came 5 test pages. They were stuck in limbo someplace, unregarded by any log file. Sigh. I don't even know why I thought of that as a possible solution, I have a funny brain, in that way. Yeah, I'll spend some more time experimenting in it, soon. I'd rather be fair than not.
Why all this Linux stuff? Well, first-off, I mucked with SUSE before we went to the airport. Then, in the evening, the girls watched some chick flick or another ... something about a painter, a girl and an earring? I dunno. No chase scenes, no Arwen. Oh, well. So I came back up here and installed UserLinux in a VMware machine, just for fun. Then, while that was installing and configuring, I downloaded the two ISO images for Progeny Debian Developer Edition 2.0, Beta 1. So that was pulling down at a reasonable rate as I followed the directions for installing UserLinux. Right now, UserLinux seems mostly to be configuration and meta-packages, that is, pre-selected groups of programs. After installing Debian Sarge (the "Testing" tree), I updated to unstable, then added the recommened Apt sources, and ran the command: apt-get install userlinux-soho-desktop - the result was a pull of around 560 packages, most from the standard Debian unstable repository that I use.
Rule number 43/b from the Book of Testing Linux Distros. Do not ever use Ctrl+Alt+Backspace when VMware tools are running properly. It can shut down the host-system X session, killing all of your work and breaking things in interesting ways. The short version is that after some fun figuring out how to get VMware tools happily installed (I did), and experimenting a bit with getting X running properly (hint, check the contents of /var/log/XFree86.0.log, it turns out the symlink to the correct mouse device, in this case /dev/psaux, wasn't created until I made it manually), everything came right up. Did it have the same printing problem as SUSE 9.1 Pro? Yep, I had to add Goldfinger's hostname to my /etc/hosts file.
There's plenty to look at and have fun with, but I've done no more, yet, and I'm out of time to write about what I did do. So I'll leave you to your Monday, and I'll go get ready for mine. Hopefully this horrid headache I've had for the last 24 hours or so will abate, and let me have fun. Have a great day!
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July 20, 2004
0657 - Good morning. Yesterday's touristing went fairly well. Most of our progress was text-messaged to people on the left coast, but that's okay, I suppose. We took Metro downtown...
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... and hopped off at the Smithsonian station. From there we walked to the foot of the Washington Monument. We waited in line with our tickets, then rode the elevator to the top. From each point of the compass, there's a window looking out on the view from 500' up. The cleanest window faced the Jefferson Memorial. On the ride down the elevator, it slows a couple of times, and the LCD panes in the elevator walls clear for people to see the plaques emplaced within the monument, from Baltimore and New York, from the newest state, California, and many others besides. Amazing. By the base of the monument, the dry-fitted stone walls are 16' thick. Once that trip was done, we walked around and up to the freshly dedicated World War II Memorial. Dani found the California pillar.
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There's a whole set from the WWII Memorial: Four Eagles carry a wreath within the arches of the Pacific and the Atlantic, at each end of the oval Memorial. At one edge of the memorial, we look across a shallow water fall and pond, past the currently empty reflecting pond, and on to the Lincoln Memorial. The arches themselves are rather dramatic.
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In the center of each arch, there's a commemorative plaque set in the ground. From there we walked around the other side of the Washington Monument, and back along the Mall towards the Capitol Building. We cut into the Smithsonian Museum of American History. There we lunched at a Subway, then went through some of the exhibits. Dani found a rather wooden character claiming to be a genetics scientist according to his placard. We also saw Julia Child's kitchen, recently donated to the Museum. After wandering about in that facility for a bit, we decided to call it a day, and headed home. Walking back to the Metro, we came across a heavily over-decorated bus of some sort or another. I looked high and low, but saw neither Kesey nor any one particularly Merry. So we continued on homeward. Once there, of course I had to go harvest in the garden, for supper fixings. Marcia and Dani seemed pleased with the bounty.
Today I'm off to Gaithersburg, I don't have any idea what Marcia and Dani are going to get up to.
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July 21, 2004
No post, sorry!
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July 22, 2004
0647 - Good morning. Today is a two-stop day, but even still, I'll be less brief than yesterday. First off, let me clue you in to something I learned about Xandros. I'd been stumped by Windows Networking disappearing from my Xandros File Manager view. One day, it was just gone. I couldn't put my finger on what I'd done to break things (and yes, it usually is my fault). So I rsync'd my home back off the box, and re-installed from scratch, intending to see just what the problem was. Windows Networking stuff was working again... no big surprise. I added some Debian packages I need, and the WinNet stuff kept going. I did this, I did that, nothing killed it. Hmmm, so I stopped paying attention, put my networking profile stuff in, turned off KDM and got rolling. Today, I noticed ... Windows Networking was gone again. I looked deeply into Samba configs and my networking profiles setup... I must have broken something!
Nope. Not in any real sense. There's a program called netserv. It comes in via the Xandros-netserv package, and it's a BSD-licensed binary (no sources available - one of Xandros' competitive edges, I guess). Netserv provides the fancy interfacing between KDE and Samba (and some other protocols) that makes the Xandros distribution so good. But (here's the kicker) it doesn't get started in any normal way. No init script call, nothing mentions it anywhere in the /etc tree. The binary is launched into the background (owned by root) by the customized version of KDM that Xandros ships. So in my network profile change-over scripts, I've added a couple of lines fore and aft, to handle the netserv and samba requirements of Xandros:
#!/bin/bash
export PROFILE_PATH="/etc/network/profiles/$1"
if [ -e $PROFILE_PATH ]
then
killall netserv
/etc/init.d/samba stop
/etc/init.d/networking stop
cd /etc
rm hosts resolv.conf
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/hosts .
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/resolv.conf .
cd network
rm interfaces
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/interfaces .
/etc/init.d/networking start
/etc/init.d/samba start
/usr/bin/netserv &
exit 0
fi
echo "$1 network profile doesn't exist. Pull the other one..."
exit 1
The new lines are bolded. I kill the netserv process(es), and Samba, do all my other network profile related activities, then restart samba and launch netserv into the background. For now, it seems to be working. I'll have to see how it goes in a couple of different environments over the next few days. If there's a problem, I'll report it and mention here, too.
Dani and Marcia are having a nice relaxing week, not doing too much, and enjoying that immensely, methinks. I'm somewhat jealous. Oh, in other news, the editor of that proposed book has requested a sample topic to be written, perhaps 6 to 8 pages. I'll be getting to that very shortly, I'd like to have it out of my hands by Monday, I've just been so busy.
Speaking of which, I must be going. Have a great day!
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July 23, 2004
0653 - Good morning. Whatever I might have done, I ended up yesterday evening watching some of Overboard, the old Goldie Hawn / Kurt Russell flick, with my niece. That was after fighting with a borked update on a Cobalt RaQ 550 for a couple of hours. I managed to figure out where ChiliSoft parked their stuff, how they build against Apache (the package that was updated on the server), un-break the broken bits of the build process and get the ASP functionality running again on the machine. <modesty grin="aw, shucks"> Yeah, sometimes I rock. Go me! </modesty>
Now I'm off to work again. Have a great day!
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July 24, 2004
0824 - Good morning. Yesterday evening, I wrote about three and a half pages of sample topic for the proposed new book. Today I'm going to finish that, along with harvesting out a bunch of tomatoes and making sauce to freeze. More when I get the chance. Have fun!
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July 25, 2004
1451 - Good afternoon. I have a bad cold, or the beginning of the flu. Shortly after my two-line post yesterday, I started sneezing up a storm. I made it through the day, and have two gallons of pasta sauce still simmering. I also reinstalled Windows, which had lost it's mind in one of the recent updates. Yeah, Windows. Remember, my gaming operating system - I wanted to play something light and pretty - Myst URU fits the requirement perfectly. We ordered pizza in last night, then I slept. And slept. I got up, still whacked, at midnoon today. We just got back from the weekend shopping run. Now I'm going downstairs to hang with my niece for a little while longer before we take her to the airport. Have a great day!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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