Linux-Blog

Hardware/OS

1.  Summary of bringing up Roheryn

2.  OpenSolaris on Windfola

3.  e-Mail - move to Roheryn or keep on Shadowfax?

MovableType

1.  Impressions of 4.2

2.  Restore cross-post plugin

3.  Install auto-post-to-Twitter capability

4.  CAPTCHA capability for comments

5.  Comment notification

I'm working on the infrastructure for the NOLA Bloggers Bazaar project. I fired up windfola, my 4U, 4-processor (750mhz) Compaq Proliant. It had Debian "Etch" on it, but I decided to experiment a bit.

I installed FreeBSD 7.0, and it went very smoothly. Using the "ports collection" with FreeBSD is an interesting and enjoyable way to build a server. While FreeBSD has packages like the popular Linux distributions do, the "ports" are a different principle. Instead of downloading and installing pre-compiled binaries, you go into a tree structure (/usr/ports), choose what you're looking to install, and run a pre-configured Makefile.

This procedure makes old-school *NIX people more comfortable, since you're compiling specifically for the particular machine. I successfully got Apache2 and php5 up and running with no problem. Still, since I already have a FreeBSD server (shadowfax), I opted to go back to Linux for windfola, in the form of Ubuntu.

I downloaded the "server" distribution of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), burned it and booted it up. Unlike the "desktop" CDs, this is not a "live" boot. It kicked directly into a character-based install. After getting started and configuring the hard drives (I essentially used the same partition configuration that was there for FreeBSD, with ext3 file system), the install asked what server packages I wanted to install. One of the choices was LAMP.

Yup, it said LAMP with a box to tick an X next to it.

Linux
Apache
MySQL
Perl/PHP/Python

LAMP

ORA promotion of LAMP has made them a lot of money publishing books in the last few years, and it's pretty much a no-brainer for most Linux/FreeBSD shops that they'll go down this road. My first LAMP configuration was on shadowfax, and that was a drawn-out process. I fetched all the necessary tarballs, made a pot of tea, and did a lot of web surfing while all that stuff compiled. This time, I ticked a check box and all four appeared on the server. VERY nice!

Of course, the package installs are never perfect, so there's tweaking to be done. I'm using advice from a HowtoForge article entitled The Perfect Server - Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) So far, so good.

I'm tempted to play with Ubuntu 8.04 Beta (Hardy Heron). After all, I don't have the tablet functions working on GG at the moment, so I don't think there's anything I'll lose in terms of functionality.

HH installs Firefox 3, though, and that might cause problems with some of my add-ons.

Maybe I'll burn the CD and bring it with me on the next trip.

and installed Ubuntu on Firefoot anyway, but this is pretty cool:

HP has agreed to pre-install Novell's Linux distribution on some of its notebook and desktop range in India. However, the computer maker said it currently has no plans to extend that deal to EMEA.

SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10-loaded HP computers will begin shipping to India in the second quarter of this year.

The deal marks HP as the latest big name vendor to provide systems pre-installed with the Linux distribution to the consumer market.

Of course, if they made SuSe work with the tablet pc's twist screen out of the box, I might even forsake Ubuntu.

I go back-and-forth on the whole "browser-based" thing. When I was working in Windows, I was a happy camper in terms of blogging. I used the Semagic client to post to LiveJournal and a freeware program called W.bloggar to post to my Movable Type blogs. Switching to Ubuntu, I gave ScribeFire a try, had some issues with it, and switched to LogJam for LJ and BloGTK+ for the blogs.

The issues I originally encountered with ScribeFire centered around discovery of blogs and categories. At the time, my server was running MT 3.2, and the categories were just not coming up. I lost patience with SF and started in with BloGTK+. That application worked just fine, but only allowed me to select a single catgory per post. If I wanted multiple categories, I would have to go back to the server and edit the post. For LiveJournal, ScribeFire was particularly problematic, because I'm a member of over 100 LJ communities, and post in about 20 of those. My LJ activity is at a level where I really need a LJ-specific client.

When I upgraded MT on shadowfax to 4.1, I wondered if SF would behave any better. I had a brand-new install of Firefox 2.0.12 on this computer (stybba), so now was the best time to give it a shot. I don't know if it was improvements in MT that made the difference or if I messed up something in FireFox, but it's looking good so far.



There are two things I like most about ScribeFire, multiple category selection, and the ability to use different accounts. I post to Linux-Blog.com under my name, but I post to the political and cooking blogs as YatPundit. When I set up both accounts, SF allowed me to select the blogs I want to list, so I picked the ones for each account, making one complete list. With a standalone client, I would have to log out of one account and back in to the other one. The multiple categories is something simple but useful.



ScribeFire also has a split-window feature, so you can put up a page in the top of the browser window and the editor below. I usually slide the editor to fill the window, but the split effect is useful when doing a copy/paste from a source page.



The RTF editor is also a help. I've always been comfortable with using source HTML in a client, but the latest MT presented a challenge with that. If I post in source, I have to use paragraph tags. If I do that, though, the cross-post feature sent extra spaces between paragraphs over to LiveJournal. I'd still have to go back in a LJ client and fix it. By using the RTF editor, everything works smoothly.

ScribeFire is a current plugin up to FireFox 3.04 beta. I recommend it.

Still fooling around with this, but no joy as of now.  The install CD booted up, but the default install would not recognize the keyboard, so I didn't get very far.  Tried a "safe"  mode install next.  That got past the keyboard issue.  I went through the install wizard and it created the file system, installed the OS (supposedly), and got to the point where it was asking for CD2.  My CD2  isn't being seen by the system, so it let me cancel that and just start PC-BSD from there.  I let it reboot.  The bootloader came up, I chose the PC-BSD partition, but then it went into an auto-boot cycle.

I'll come back to it after I experiment with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.10, to see if the Flash workarounds are sufficient to justify installing that OS on the new tablet.

In a previous post, I describe my trials and tribulations with the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution (Gutsy Gibbon) and my older tablet PC, Stybba. The consensus of the feedback was to drop back to the 6.06 release (Dapper Drake). Since Gutsy Gibbon had failed so miserably, and the PC-BSD distribution as well, I took the advice and dropped back a bit.

<lj-cut text="lots of geekishness behind the cut">

Dapper Drake booted up smoothly, installed with no problems, and I'm currently making this entry via the Scribefire plugin for Firefox. The 6.06 distribution came bundled with Firefox 1.5, so I immediately upgraded to 2.0.12, using these instructions from the Ubuntu community site.

So far, so good. The performance issues I had with GG are gone; Stybba is responding fine. Things got sluggish last night when I had about seven tabs open, including one for Daily Kos and another for iGoogle. dKos was extremely active because it was election night, so that combined with iGoogle's regular updating slowed things down a bit. I backed off on the content open and things went back to normal.

I've also revisited Scribefire as a blogging environment, but that'll be the subject of a separate entry.

While Stybba functions nicely as a basic PC under DD, I still haven't gotten the tablet functions to work properly yet. Using insight from here and here, I installed wacom-tools and the rest of the suggested packages and reconfigured X11 for the tablet screen and stylus.

When I re-booted the system, my first problem was that I didn't properly close one of the configuration sections in xorg.conf, so the entire desktop blew up. I fixed that from the command line, rebooted, and still no tablet functionality. Here are the mods I made to xorg.conf:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "stylus"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS4"
Option "Type" "stylus"
Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "eraser"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS4"
Option "Type" "eraser"
Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "cursor"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS4"
Option "Type" "cursor"
Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"

Simply pasting this in blew up X11, I'm assuming because the last Section doesn't have an EndSection. I added that from a command-line edit, and things came back fine.

I also added a line to "Startup Programs" on the desktop per the blog:

8.Now on the top panel click on System&gt; Preferences&gt; Sessions&gt; Startup Programs
Click "Add" to paste the following string /usr/X11R6/bin/./xinput set-button-map stylus 1 3 2 4.

I assumed that the period at the end of the line was for punctuation and not part of the add, so I didn't put it.

Still, no tablet goodness yet. If anyone's got suggestions, I'd appreciate the input.

Since I decided to buy a new computer, I spent the evening working on my other two notebooks. Arod, my Acer C310, is going to my son, and Stybba, my Acer C101, will be a free agent when Firefoot, the new HP Tablet PC, arrives later this week. Since Stybba is no longer "production" but "development," I experimented last night with putting Linux on it.



The last time I put Linux on Stybba was Debian's "Woody" release. Since I had such success with Ubuntu on Arod, I decided to give it a try on the older, smaller, Stybba.

Stybba is a 800mhz, 256mb RAM, 12.1" tablet system running WinXP (Tablet Edition). I still had the 5GB partition I used for Debian as well as a 512MB partition for swap. I downloaded the ISO file for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), burned it to a CD, and fired it up.

The system booted to the initial install screen OK. I chose to do a regular install, and it began to load. At this point, the graphics went south, with the default Gnome desktop becoming fuzzy and unreadable. Thinking that the install procedure might correct itself, I double-clicked the "Install" icon and let the process go forward. No luck, it was a fuzzy mess. By the time I got to the world map to set the timezone, I gave up and power-cycled the system.

I tried the "safe graphics" mode next. No luck, this produced identical results.

Well, doesn't that just suck. OK, this isn't a do-or-die project, so maybe Ubuntu GG just isn't going to cut it on this little guy. I then gave xubuntu a try, again with the 7.10 distribution. xubuntu is a variant of the regular Ubuntu distribution, but designed to install Xfce4 as the desktop. The theory is that Xfce4 is a lighter weight than current Gnome or KDE, so it should work better on older hardware.

xubuntu fired up OK, and the install was crystal clear, if a bit slow. A normal ubuntu install completed, re-booted, and the Gnome login came up. The screen was once again a mess, same symptoms as the regular ubuntu install. The login dialog was visible, though, if not readable, so I logged in anyway. The Gnome login screen vanished and the Xfce4 desktop came up just fine. Response was very sluggish, though. I let it do the security updates, re-booted, then added Thunderbird. The packages installed OK, but performance still dragging.

I fired up Thunderbird from the Apps menu. The program came up and I set up an account. Pulled in 85 messages and the thing just stopped. No mouse movement, no disk access, nothing. Hard reset, tried again, same thing. Third time, I let it sit, hit delete a few times (spam e-mails at the bottom of the list), and went in the back to take a shower. When I came out, the message count had decreased because of the deletions, but it was just ridiculous.

This won't do. I figure it must be GG that's running the system into the dirt, rather than the desktop.

If anyone's got ideas, I'm open for suggestions. I'm going to try FreeBSD for shits and grins anyway, since this is essentially a development box at the moment.

I've tried to blog about Linux in the past, with varying levels of success. I set up a domain, www.linux-blog.com, but never got any traction in terms of my thoughts to make it a worthwhile project. While on breaks in class today, I decided to give it another shot, and start talking about making Ubuntu Linux my primary operating system on Arod, my notebook computer.

Arod is my Acer C310 tablet notebook system. He's got 512mb of RAM and came with XP installed. So far, I haven't reached a point where I need more with this system, so I'm hanging on to it. Like all my travel computers, I've always wanted to have it dual-boot, Linux of some flavor to play with and Windows because I get paid too much to screw around if it's crunch time. Bottom line is, there are a lot of PowerPoint presentations and Word documents that just don't look the same in OpenOffice.org.

That said, I do most of my work in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) these days. I installed Ubuntu back in October. I'm Charlie Brown and Linux is my Lucy. I see the football, I run to kick it, the football vanishes, and I land on my back. I think I've kicked it this time.

I've found a great resource in my quest to replace XP, The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The author's goal was to replace Windows with open source apps for audio and video editing/manipulation. The stuff added to a basic Ubuntu install through this resource is a great start for me.

So far, the bulk of my time in Ubuntu has been using Firefox and Thunderbird. I've been experimenting with plugins for both, making judgements whether or not a specific task is best done inside the browser or with a separate application.

First application up is something to blog with. In Windows, I use either , Scribefire in Firefox, or a freeware program called wbloggar. In Linux, my choices are Scribfire again, or BloGTK as a replacement for wbloggar.

A lot of bloggers will wonder why bother with a client that's separate from the blog software itself in the first place. If you've ever had dKos, WordPress, or Blogger lock up and vanish in the middle of a diary you were writing, you'll appreciate the usefulness of working in a local client. You can type up your entry, spell-check, etc., locally, then either post directly to your blog, or (in the case of sites like dKos) copy/paste the finished entry into the site's page.

Scribefire is a "plugin" for the Firefox web browser. The idea is to allow you to stay in the browser while blogging, making it a bit easier to link to other sites, copy/paste, etc. From a technical perspective, using a blogging client that's part of the browser means less network stuff to configure anyway. I found Scribefire to be a good entry point for my Moveable Type-based blogs. Unfortuntately, I got curious with Firefox and upgraded to the beta-test version, 3.02, and the Scribefire plugin is not compatible.

No biggie, back to the stand-alone client. I use BloGTK, a basic blog-entry client that supports blogs based on Blogger, Moveable Type, WordPress, and other platforms. BloGTK has a solid editor with spellcheck, with basic html formatting capabilities:

So far, BloGTK has delivered the same functionality I got with the Windows-based program. Chalk up this application as a win for moving away from Windows.

and because I don't want to do a lot of work on this blog to update the templates, I'm just going to start this project over. I never did have a serious focus for this blog, and I think I do now. Let's see.