Using Linux

The first software beyond the default included with Linux Mint that I install is always a tough choice. I want to customize and change so many things, but what to do first?

I found that it is really difficult to live without CheckGmail. This little tray application is magnificent. It relies on the Atom feeds from Gmail to present almost the full functionality of the inbox right in the system tray. One can see the list of new messages and previews, open, mark as read, archive, report spam, and delete—right from the floating window it displays.

I also use GnuCash to track my finances, which I needed to install.

Other first pass installations include Unison for file synchronization, Quod Libet for music and tag editing, and VLC for video.

Anyone have any other essential apps?

Next on my list is VirtualBox.

Although I just did a fresh install of Linux Mint the other day, I decided to do it again to straighten some things out before I had customized everything. Mostly I chose to reinstall because I was having a difficult time installing VMware Server. Because it requires a manual install, when it didn’t work, I wasn’t able to go find all the traces it had left all over the system to uninstall. I’m going to try VirtualBox instead.This time around I had extreme difficulties with my mix of IDE and SATA drives working correctly with GRUB.

My setup is this:

• Primary IDE
  • first partition: Windows XP
  • second partition: /home
  • third partition: Linux Mint
• Secondary IDE (linux swap)
• SATA 1 (data)
• SATA 2 (data)
• eSATA (data)
• USB IDE (data)

On the last screen of the install utility the “Advanced…” button gave the default for the bootloader installation as (hd0), which I thought would be acceptable. It wasn’t. GRUB would never start and the system would boot directly into Windows every time. I could boot into Linux with the Super Grub Disk, but that was not an ideal solution.

It turns out, the BIOS or the system or whatever sees the IDE drives first and the SATA drives second. Once any part of Linux Mint loads, its GRUB sees the SATA drives first and the IDE drives second. Therefore, (hd0) probably was /dev/sda during installation, which turned out to be the eSATA drive. I wanted the bootloader on the primary IDE drive.

I determined all of this with hours of going back and forth tweaking my /boot/grub/menu.lst file and trying to restore or install GRUB with Super Grub Disk. Using Super Grub Disk is how I found out the system sees the drives differently before Linux Mint starts. The GRUB command find /boot/grub/stage1 using SGD returned (hd0,2), while the same command from a terminal within the Linux Mint install or LiveCD returned (hd3,2).

I decided to redo the reinstall. This time I chose a different option from the “Advanced…” button on that last screen of the install utility. Instead of leaving it at (hd0) as is the default, I chose the drive from the list that I knew had the Windows partition on it. Although I thought it should be the first drive, it was listed as /dev/sdd. I deliberately chose the drive and not one of the partitions (/dev/sdd1, etc.).

The problems weren’t completely fixed there. The /boot/grub/menu.lst file had to be altered slightly. By changing references to (hd3,2) into (hd0,2) in the Linux section, GRUB would be able to boot into Linux properly.

The Windows section needed a little more tweaking. I found a few options on some forums. I removed all the map references and changed the Windows section to this:

title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

After that change, everything booted like it was supposed to. I was amazed. GRUB loaded and I could choose Linux or Windows and each would come up with no problems at all. I was quite happy, finally.

So, after some troubles with my computer (namely, my Ubuntu Feisty partition filling up so much that I couldn’t log in), I needed to wipe everything and start fresh.

Fresh like Mint.

I decided to check out Linux Mint after a recommendation. What sold me on it was a screenshot showing that it only had one taskbar/menubar. There was no top and bottom bar business like Ubuntu has that wastes valuable screen real estate.

The process wasn’t painless, though. Apparently a new version of some part of the OS decides not to distinguish between IDE and SATA drives anymore when naming devices. My primary IDE drive became /dev/sdd and so it was listed after my e-SATA and SATA drives when it came time to install GRUB.

Since I have a Windows partition on the same IDE drive as the Linux partition, this caused all kinds of problems and I couldn’t boot into any OS.

After trying a few things I stumbled across a forum posting that made something a bit more clear. I needed to change the numbering for GRUB back to (hd0,2) instead of (hd3,2) in the menu.lst file without changing the device reference from /dev/sdd3 to /dev/hdd3. I was able to boot into the LiveCD and edit that file that was on the drive.

I restarted from there and it actually worked. It only took a few extra hours and some frustration over one little part. The rest of the installation was very easy and straightforward.

I wanted to view a link to an rtsp:// streaming video and I would get a prompt that totem was the default application to be used. I would click OK but then it failed to launch.

Instead, I wanted to make VLC the player of choice. It wasn’t a preference I could set using the Firefox GUI. So, I searched.

I’m using Feisty, but using modified instructions for Edgy worked. I simply replaced the call for the RealPlayer application with one for VLC.

• Read #How to install VLC Multimedia Player with plug-in for Mozilla Firefox
• Open your firefox.
• Type as url: about:config

Now just right click somewhere into the main window. A little box with options to choose will appear. Choose “new”, then “string”. Then copy the following line into the appearing text field:

network.protocol-handler.app.rtsp

Into the next text field copy this:

/usr/bin/X11/vlc

Now you do the same thing again, but this time you do not choose “string” but “boolean”, and the line to copy is:

network.protocol-handler.external.rtsp

Then set

true

I hope this helps someone.

Rolling out a new OS version every six months is no small task, so I applaud those who work on Ubuntu. I just don’t like how it catches me off guard and causes me to realize how little free time I have.

I want to start fresh. A clean install on a formatted partition. It is the recommended procedure on many forums, and I want to rid myself of Automatix. The problem is, I need to figure out all that I will have to reinstall when I actually do it. A short list so far:

• Opera
• Unison
• whatever I did for scheduling backups

Not the best thing when I start to not remember every little tweak I have made.

Maybe that is a good reason to update it here for myself.

First I must go back and look into separating my /home directory again to its own partition.

Because I’ve been installing so many applications lately, my 10 GB partition for Ubuntu is feeling cramped. It may also have to do with the fact that I moved my /home back to the same partition as the OS because of other strange issues.

The last time I did something with GParted, it screwed up the partition. I had to use TestDisk to recover my partition that got lost. This time I plan on backing up my partition first. I’m going to run

sudo rsync -avx --progress --numeric-ids / /media/EXTERNAL/BACKUP/Ubuntu_20070728/

The -x, --progress, and --numeric-ids options I learned more about from http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups.html.

Wow, Beagle has a lot of files. I did not realize. My ~/.beagle directory has 79,832 files in it, taking up 552.3 MB of space. Next task will be to move that directory to another volume and symlink to it!

Anyway, after running rsync I booted into my trusty Puppy Linux because I knew that GParted won’t allow me to work on mounted partitions.

Honestly, I was surprised when the resize went off without a hitch.

I then booted back into Ubuntu and my partition is now doubled in size.

I should have written this post up earlier when I was really frustrated. I should have at least kept more of a running list of annoyances. Also, it should be known that I don’t have anything against KDE users or supporters—I fully recognize that people can have personal preferences. These are just some things that bothered me when interacting with Kubuntu.

Amarok keyboard shortcuts

One of the biggest reasons that I decided to give Kubuntu a shot was that I used many KDE apps regularly, including Amarok. I’ve always found it sluggish in GNOME and thought maybe running it in its native KDE would help. It didn’t really. Even when I switched to a MySQL database instead of SQLite there was still choking and freezing.

One of the biggest surprises to me was that they keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + V in Amarok was overridden by Klipper, some sort of smart clipboard application. After a little tinkering, I was able to make it function in my preferred way, but the whole process just rubbed me the wrong way.

USB drive mount settings

Had I not been able to find a workaround for the following default behavoir, I would never consider using KDE again.

The setting for automounting USB drives when they are plugged into the machine automatically assigns "shortname=lower" to the drive. (I apologize for not having any clearer information or references, I’m writing this out of memory and don’t want to dig anything up.) This might only affect FAT32 filesystems, but that is what most USB flash drives are.

What this causes to happen is that one cannot create all UPPERCASE directory names on the drive. They are forced lowercase. Mixed case names are fine, it is only UPPERCASE that has a problem.

Well, I have a few directories that I want to be named in all uppercase, UCLA for example. The problem arose when I was using Unison, a file synchronization utility, between my hard disk and a flash drive. Through no fault of the program, my directories were being duplicated: one copy in all lowercase, and another copy in all uppercase, completely messing up my synchronization.

The only fix for this that I found was to call the GNOME automounter at startup so that it would recognize when I plugged in a USB drive and give it the right settings. I think when I did this though, it caused duplicate windows that presented options for the newly detected medium to appear instead of the normal single window.

So, in the end, after only a week of using Kubuntu I was longing for the simplicity of GNOME that I had grown used to without all the quirks that interrupted my daily routines. To be sure, there are still quite a few bumps in the road when using GNOME, but generally they do not seem to stop me in my tracks. Plus, we all appreciate familiarity, and that is what I’ve grown to have with GNOME on Ubuntu.

I decided to change the name of this blog tonight simply because I realized that I no longer am just attempting to use Linux, I’m a full-fledged Linux user.

While I may not be any kind of power-user, I get along fine. I enjoy myself doing it as well.

I’ve got a couple of draft posts that I’ll put up soon. Check back for discussions about why I gave up on Kubuntu/KDE within a week and mini reviews of Linux Music Players.

Cheers.

So I ran that install command yesterday in Ubuntu. I felt like I really should try out Kubuntu because I find myself using many KDE applications more than their Gnome counterparts: Amarok, KTorrent, and most recently I’ve tried digiKam. They all seem to have far more functionality than the default programs in Ubuntu.

This seems to be the common knowledge among users as well. KDE and its native applications are more feature-packed than Gnome and its native applications, but therefore they are more complicated and not necessarily recommended for beginners.

Upon startup of my KDE session I was a bit wary because I had grown accustomed to the nice, clean, simple design of the default Gnome desktop in Ubuntu. I’m sure that wariness will fade in time.

More later, when I have had a chance to play around a bit.

While I thought it would be a great idea to keep /home on a separate partition for backup purposes and the like, it turned out to be more of a headache than I had planned.

When attempting to login at the Ubuntu prompt I would get an error message saying that my /home directory did not exist. Before those errors I would usually have a problem with /etc/fstab not recognizing my external USB drive or telling me it failed fsck. The odd thing is that the external USB drive and the drive which /home resided on had nothing to do with each other.

After moving /home back to the partition that the rest of Feisty is installed on, I was able to login just fine. (Once again I must say that Puppy Linux saved the day.) I still get superblock errors on my external drive, even though it works fine after the system boots up.

I think I will handle backups using this method with tar.

I also found Unison which should handle syncing with my USB flash drive.