Another Opinion Among Many

I am playing around with an old Acer AcerNote Lite.  Its not got a lot going for it by today’s standards.  It is a cute little laptop, and was likely quite a nice little item when new.  It would have come originally with Windows 95 on it and I am certainly not going to even try to reinstall that (I’d have to have the floppies).  The specs are:

• 120mhz Pentium processor
• 8MB system RAM and 32MB RAM module
• 1GB HD
• Chips & Technologies video
• Floppy
• no CD Rom

This should be interesting.  So far, I’ve gotten the Debian Etch floppies to start an install.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’ve got to get a 16 bit ethernet PCMCIA card to proceed any further, as I’ll need to get the rest of the system off the internet.  Perhaps I’ll try for DSL and see if I can do the floppy netinstall hack mentioned in the forums.  Wish me luck!

So, a few weeks ago, Ubuntu “upgraded” Firefox 2.0.0.12 (which is a decent release) to Firefox 3 Beta and I couldn’t view any java applets any more.  The reason is because some of the file paths are changing and the plugins need to be linked to a different spot.  I had to try Opera but it crashed.  That left me with Konqueror, which is not native to Gnome, for the time being.

That has just changed.  I just found Bug #173966 and there was a hack proposed that helped me to get back on track.  The solution, for now:

cd  /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so .   <–note the “dot”

Your plugin path might be different, but that’s where one place mine can be found (actually, its a symbolic link to the plugin, which is in  /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so)

Friday evening,  I saw the “Message Waiting” light blinking on our phone, so I grabbed the handset to see what the message was.  When I turned the handset on, there was no sound coming from the ear piece.  We have another handset, so I tried that one.  Sure enough, no fast beeping and no dial tone.  However, our DSL connection was steady and strong.

Figuring that this might be a temporary problem, I let the issue go for the time being.  After all, we don’t really make too many phone calls.  Saturday morning came and the line was still toneless.  So, I unplugged our phone and DSL filter/modem from the jack and let it “clear” for about a minute, as I’d been previously advised to do at our old home (we had two cordless handsets there and when they were both in use, the dial tone would go - got rid of one).

This did not work, so I went to the local payphone and called for an appointment.  The call center agent went through some basic troubleshooting.  As I suspected, a visit was required.  So, the next available appointment was an “all day” one for today.  I was surfng the net about 1/2 hour ago and my internet connection died.  So, I checked the lights on DSL modem.  The connection light was blinking, which means that it was trying to sync.  It went solid, so I tried the phone beside the modem and my dial tone was back! Then, I heard a tech introduce himself and advise he had fixed the problem.  He must have been at the CO, as I saw no Aliant truck anywhere near.

On a lark, I check my modem’s line stats and it seems that my theoretical maximum line speed is now a bit faster.  Before, it was about 2.8MBits/sec, which is why I didn’t bother going for the “up to” 5MBit Ultra service for $10 more per month.  I wouldn’t see a significant change in speed from my 1.5 MBit connection to justify the extra cost.   The stats page shows now, a max of about 3.6MBits, so there is definitely an overall improvement in my telephone line connection.

I am impressed.  Thank you, Aliant.  You have delivered exactly what you said that you would.  There’s another company that offers services that you do, but they don’t deliver what they say that they will.  In my opinion, you may have competitors, but you don’t have any competition.

I sure hope so!

I’ve just noticed that on the Gentoo home page, which has been pretty much stagnant, as far as news or activity is concerned, seems to have had a burst of activity.  Since January 12, there have been 9 posts on the home page.  This is more than in the previous 5 months.  The news is encouraging.  I’m happy with what I see.  Awesome!

NOTE: this tip may be specific to Ubuntu, as far as the command goes…

One thing that I’ve noticed is that many distros are starting to change their partition references in /etc/fstab to a UUID from the more familiar (but no friendlier) reference to the volume in /dev (such as /dev/hdc3, for example).  This might be a sign of things to come, since any distro based on the 2.6 Linux kernel has pretty much dropped the /dev for udev (hot plugging for cold plugging, etc).  After looking into things, its good for situations where drives are being moved or removed now and then (as in when you plug in your USB hard drive).

However, if you’re a constant alpha/beta tester at heart, like I am, you are probably using a main Linux partition or drive to work from and have either a spare drive or partition that you frequently blow away and replace what’s on it with the latest fun toy, as I do.  I don’t know how many distros are doing this with the UUID so far, but I suspect that Fedora does and I know that Ubuntu and Mandriva are now doing it.  So, what happens if you are tired of what you’ve been testing and you want to install something new? As soon as you format the drive, the UUID will change.  How do you reference the drive in your /etc/fstab, so that you can either find it when you want to mount it, or when you want to boot from the new distro? The first “U” is for “unique”, and they are! Here’s what’s currently in my /boot/grub/menu.lst for the Mandrake alpha 2 that I’m playing with: root=UUID=b414e306-0582-4572-926d-a8c113bf34bb.

That’s not exactly the stuff of memorization, and, in a few hours, it’ll be different, as I’m going to hose it and reinstall it with a totally different configuration (I wanna try KDE 4!!!).  So, how do I get the new volume ID to put in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst? With Ubuntu, you have a command called vol_id that you can run as root to determine various things about the volumes that are accessible to your computer.

The command is vol_id.  So, the command to find a volume ID is:

sudo vol_id -u device

where device is the /dev entry for the partition you want to know about.  for example,

sudo vol_id -u /dev/hdc3

would yield the long scary output that you need to enter into your files.

I hope that this helps all you distro hoppers out there as much as it has me.

I’ve tried this recently and it does actually work. Thanks to Ed Labonte’s mention of this trick in his podcast The Linux Install Podcast. If you have a computer that has become unresponsive, you can make it reboot if you have to without hitting the power switch by doing the following:

Hold down the “ALT” key and the “Print Screen|SysReq” key. Then, type, ensuring that you definitely type the right letters distinctly. The letters you type, while still holding down those two keys, is “R” “E” “I” “S” “U” “B”. This should give your system back to you.

Good luck with that.

In July, I wrote about reading a Wired article on Hans Reiser and the sensation around his arrest for murdering his estranged wife (who is quite possibly alive).  The trial is going on now.  It appears that only the San Francisco Chronicle seems to be interested at this point.  I wonder whether it will again become world news if Nina Reiser is found to be alive.