Another Opinion Among Many

I got a motherboard and processor from my brother that would be a great upgrade to my old P-III. I quickly secured a cheap stick of RAM and hooked everything up. The problem is that I couldn’t seem to get anything to install on the drives. It was always coming up with errors, causing a total failure. So, I bought a replacement motherboard, thinking that I might be having problems with the IDE connectors. I really wanted to use the board my bro gave me, though, as it had better capabilities.

I had the same issues with the new board, although the operating systems that were currently on the hard drives in the machine recognized the board and booted. I still received compression errors and files weren’t saving properly. Even after installing brand new IDE cables (the pretty round ones that glow under UV light), I still had these issues.

Programs that are memory intensive, like Firefox (yes, it is, all you naysayers - its the browser that I use, and likely a lot longer than you have, but its still got leaks), would crash for no apparent reason. Many games would just refuse to load. I began to suspect something else (which I should have checked before spending money).

It turns out that the cheap used memory module was priced so low for a reason. Its crap (to quote Fab from Linux Outlaws). A quick memory test with memtest86 indicated that there were errors on 5 of the tests in the thousands. Its a guarantee that I will have better luck with a good memory stick.

So, remember, if you’re getting I/O errors, check your memory first, as its pretty much the cheapest fix, and a likely suspect.

I thought that I’d follow up on my complaint about the non-working PenguinTV on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. From a forum post, I found a workaround:

In a terminal, type export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox and then export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox and then execute PenguinTV: PenguinTV &, which allows the program to find what its looking for.

That’s a bit arduous, so why not automate it? I did so, and it is really a hack, but I thought that I’d share it with you. Anyone who has created bash scripts before (or batch files in Windows/DOS) will find this to be quite trivial, but there are many out there who still haven’t “gotten their feet wet”.

So, the first thing that you’ll want to do is open your favorite editor. For quick and dirty scripts like this one, I use nano, as many systems have it included and the learning curve is quite small. So, for nano, you would open a terminal and type nano -w Pengi. I use Pengi as the name for my script. you can use whatever you want. The -w flag for nano causes it to continue beyond the border of your terminal when writing a line, keeping you from truncating a long command. Its not really necessary for this script because the commands are quite short, but its a good habit.

Here’s what you put in your editor:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox

PenguinTV

Save the file.  Ensure that you’ve typed each command on a new line.  Then change it to executable with a quick chmod: chmod a+rwx Pengi

You can now open PenguinTV on the command prompt by typing /home/your-username/Pengi
That’s not the end of it, though, right?  You want your nice little icon to execute the file when you click it, I am sure.  Whether I use Gnome, KDE, or XFCE, I’ve become accustomed to putting a quick launch for my favorite applications on the taskbar for easy access.  This is the case for PenguinTV as well.

Its quite easy, in these desktop environments, to change the attributes of an application launcher.  Its even a tad easier than when using Microsoft Windows, as you don’t have to remember to put quotes around the application path.  So, you would right-click the PenguinTV icon and select “properties” from the menu.  In the “path to executable”, you would replace “PenguinTV” with “/home/your-username/Pengi" (without the quotes, of course) and click OK.  You should be in business and PenguinTV should open with the right environment variables to launch successfully.

I found a nice entry today that you might like if you want to speed up your Ubuntu. Its pretty much common sense, but its a nice collation of tips. Here’s the article: A Quick Way to Improve Ubuntu Linux Operating Speed Performance.

So, the puddle at the end of our driveway is becoming the lake that is swallowing our driveway. I hope that we have a few days in a row of really sunny weather so that the snow will melt off some more, and, with any luck, the ground will thaw a bit and absorb some of the wet stuff. It would be nice if this was truly spring. After all, it IS April. I remember that this time last year, the utility that I work for was waiting for the run of warm enough days so that they could go and shut off the delinquents. Its amazing what you can scam out of your local utility in Ontario. No wonder the prices are going up, thanks to those who know how to fleece the system repeatedly.

My grandfather’s funeral consumed the weekend, of course, so we (Angela and I) spent much of Saturday and Sunday traveling. Despite the short stay in Nova Scotia, it was a pleasant time, with the exception of the funeral itself, of course. Saying all that, the minister who did the ceremony was excellent and his eulogy was that of a family friend, rather than that of a stranger making up encouraging words, which really made a big difference. He stirred up some memories with his own recollections, which was nice. Something that I didn’t know is that my grandfather (and great uncle) had two deceased infant sisters. I wonder how they coped with that as kids. I don’t really want to find out personally, though.

My brother gave me an old camera of his, a Kodak DX4900. Its not a bad camera - not quite as sleek as the Olympus, but it actually works as intended. I went to Future Shop and got a replacement Compact Flash card for it so that I won’t be limited to the piddly 16MB card that it came with. So, now instead of taking 24 pictures on my regular card, I can take 999 pictures on my Sandisk 2GB Ultra II card, which is supposed to be faster than a normal Compact Flash card. Its too bad that the camera doesn’t get recognized under Linux as a flash drive. At least gPhoto picks it up and wants to import your photos for you. Perhaps I should get a card reader for a situation like this.

Wow, what a buzz about Wordpress 2.5. I’m not going to say anything new about it, as the net is saturated with goop about everyone’s new installations. One thing I will warn, though, is the same thing that I warn every time. Back up your site before doing a major change to it! With Wordpress sites, that means, for sure, backing up your database. If you have cPanel, use its convenient backup feature, as its just a mouse click. Do the same for your home directory if you’ve had a lot of changes since you last backed up. At the very least, back up your /wp-content directory, so that your customizations on your theme and plugins will remain intact elsewhere in case a back up is needed. It can’t hurt to export your Wordpress blog via the built in export facility. There’s a lot of goodness in that .xml file.

Do you need a job? Do you live in the Fredericton area? My employer is still hiring. If you want the details, email me. I will refer you and you’ll make me rich! (okay, not rich, but their is an incentive, like a head hunter’s bounty). You’ll also get the chance to work hard and make lots of your own money, of course.

Have you had a problem with an application that you got from outside the approved Ubuntu mirrors? Did it refuse to run? Did you know that you can execute a program from a command prompt by typing its name and hitting ENTER? Did you know that most programs will give you extra info via the -v (verbose) switch?

I have recently had that problem with a rss aggregator named PenguinTV. Its nice and simple and will grab just about any audio or video feed, like Miro, without the heavy system requirements (it uses the default apps to play the media, for example, instead of handling that itself). Its ideal for podcast fetching. The problem is that the version that is available in the software showcase does not work without telling the program some things that it should figure out itself. I tried the solution on the forum post about the same problem that I’d encountered of trying to get the latest .deb from the project’s home page. However, I was getting a “bad syntax” error.

This is because Ubuntu has switched from bash as its default shell to dash (lighter and faster, closer to the original ash shell). On nearly every distribution of GNU/Linux, /bin/sh is a symbolic link to /bin/bash, so nearly all executable scripts in /usr/bin will begin with the shebang #!/bin/sh. With /usr/bin/PenguinTV, open it up with a text editor as root and change the shebang to #!/bin/bash and it will run, as the developer is using bash!

…now if I can only find out why it sometimes core dumps…(I just found gPodder, which might be the ultimate solution)

If you remember, I  mentioned a hard drive replacement a while ago.  I haven’t tried to revive it yet with a tool like Spinright yet, but I may still be able to get something out of it.  That was a hard drive failure.  It doesn’t boot or recognize at all at the moment.

I thought that I was going through that with another one as well.  The hard drive in Frankenputer seemed to have gone on me after another update of Hardy Heron.  I had split the drive up into three partitions, one as the root partition “/”, swap, and a third one as “/home”.  The root partition was formatted as EXT3 and the /home was partitioned as ReiserFS.  After yet another update (development software after all), I rebooted into a corrupted first partition and E2FSCK didn’t help, dropping me to a single user recovery shell.  I ran FSCK manually and was able to get the partition reorganized.  I carried on but this was not the end of my troubles.

One more update killed it for good, I thought.  My drive was not even recognized on boot.  Its the second hard drive and I actually have GRUB, my bootloader on the first drive.  I’ve been letting whichever operating system that does the latest update handle GRUB, which meant that the config file with the instructions for GRUB “/boot/grub/menu.list”, was on the second drive on the corrupted partition.  no problem, I just popped in a Linux install CD (Ubuntu of some version, I recall), and chose the option to boot from the first hard drive to get into Arch Linux o that I could do some online digging about this problem.

Somehow, the corruption of the first partition seemed to have affected the boot sector of the second drive as well, which was causing the problem with the BIOS picking up the drive.  I was able to “see” and mount the “/home” partition, so I figured that the drive just couldn’t be dead, as I had thought.  I immediately attempted to back up as much data as I could access onto DVD, which was quite successful, albeit a tad slow, as the OS and the DVD burner were on the same IDE cable.  On a lark, I reformatted the first partition with ReiserFS, which in my opinion, has a far superior recovery on unexpected shutdown.  Suddenly, the whole drive was once again visible to the BIOS.

I reinstalled Gutsy Gibbon and used my existing “/home” and restored my user and each of the kids.  The only difference was that a few programs were missing, which  can be recovered, and some theme-related files which were in “/usr/share” were not available.

So, the take away from this story is that your hard drive may not actually be bad.  It might just be that your hardware is not perfectly suited to go together and a file system corruption may be the cause of your troubles.

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!