Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Linux/Open Source

  • Linux USB Device Support Database

    I usually have been putting bookmarkable things on delicious, not my weblog, but I just wanted to say that this USB device support database gives great information about supported USB devices (and how to make them work). The secret is to sort them by date in order to show devices that have the most recent comments.

  • Bloggers Report on Linux Laptops

    While doing research about linux support for my T43 laptop, I discovered something cool. The linux-laptop site lets users add stories about how they got their hardware to work on linux. Nice, right?

    Now that I’ve looked some more, I see that these “stories by users” are not being hosted on the linux laptop sites but personal sites of owners.  Why is that interesting? That means that owners will periodically  update their initial report to reflect the knowledge and experience they’ve gained over the laptop’s lifespan.
    In a week or two I’ll create a similar page right here on this blog.

  • Taking a Risk with Ebay

    I did something today I thought I never would do: I bought a laptop from ebay!

    It’s scary, and the biggest stumbling block turned out to be the ebay seller’s failure to fully identify itself on ebay. Turns out the company does have a web presence , but I had no way of knowing that until after the purchase was finished. I made four different phone calls to make sure sure they were IBM business partners. (I spoke to IBM’s customer support from India, Georgia, New York, etc, and they were no help determining this).

    In my haste and disorientation I failed to notice that the same seller was selling something nearly identical on the next day; instead of a 60 gig drive, it had 80; instead of a CD writer/DVD reader, it had a DVD writer. Both items essentially cost the same. (Update: the ebay vendor agreed to swap laptops. Sweet!)
    Now I cannot be accused of lacking diligence or doing my research. The most maddening part about buying a laptop was 1)making sure I could afford it, 2)trying to find the best value, 3)trying to buy something that would run well in linux. The big sticklers turned out to be that the big companies were still fairly slow about shipping laptops, especially for laptops in great demand. I was going to a conference in the last weekend in February, so I really wanted to have something in hand by then.
    Gosh, most default configurations of laptops just don’t have enough RAM on them. Getting 2 gigs was a requirement for me, and yet, a good 50-75% of laptops still only carried 512MB (or if you were lucky, 1 gig). The other problem was that the big manufacturers were still selling hard drives with 5400 rpm; a considerable number of HP laptops (even the pricey ones) still were configured for 4200 rpm’s–which to my mind is unthinkable in this day and age.

    The other problem was Dell coupons. Lordy, they change every day, always expiring. Monday I qualified for $400 off, Tuesday I qualified for $500, Wednesday I qualified for $600 with a coupon code, Thursday I qualified for $300 off, and today I qualified only for a stinking $250 rebate. Yes, it’s kind of fun keeping up with them, but after a while it can be fatiguing. Finally, there is the problem of peace of mind. Dell offers extended warranties and even accident protection. In fact, though, getting a latop replaced can be a bugger. When the screen goes, it seems you have to throw the whole thing away. I would like to see laptop parts become more interchangeable (or at least easier to replace), but then again, laptops miniaturize a lot of components; even with my PC hardware repair certification, I don’t feel confident opening the back and fixing anything.

    Shall I whine about linux support? One good thing is that because I would be running linux, technical support wouldn’t be as much a deciding factor. On the other hand, I needed some way of knowing that other people had tackled the various HW configuration issues I would also face. With Dell, you had a choice of using Intel’s Core Duo integrated graphics (ugh) or upgrading with a $300 nvidia graphics card (double ugh!). The Core Duo laptops didn’t yet have a supported linux wireless driver (although Intel would be bringing one out very soon, they promise). But HP’s 64bit AMD laptop didn’t have wireless anything; you just had to use pcmia.
    A more basic problem is that vendors know their product the best, and yet they cannot objectively recommend the right option for a particular person. Do laptop hard drives need to be 7200 rpm? Or could they just be 5400? What really is the price difference between the three cpu’s you are able to choose?

    When you are on the Dell website and read the excellent sales information, you end up believing that you need everything. It’s not Dell’s fault; it’s just how information is presented online. Contrast that with buying a laptop at a store. You have 10 laptops in the store, and then you whittle them down until you find one you really like. Although I’ve spent almost a month researching laptops, I still can’t tell you what TFT is or whether there really is any difference between Sonoma and Dothan, or whether upgrading to 667MHz RAM would really make that much difference.

    Shopping online, you tend to view laptops as a sickly cousin of desktops, underpowered and inadequate. I quickly discovered that it almost never makes sense to shop for a lowend laptop. Buying a high end laptop adds longevity and flexibility to your laptop’s lifespan while imposing a heavy price.

    Here we see the cost of technological anxiety and corporate groupthink. Innovation continues at a rapid pace; mass production is driving down the cost of everything, and yet, we still don’t have a laptop that suits our needs for under $1500. When will it ever end? And why do “our needs” continue to expand where it always costs more than $1500 to satisfy them?

    Final thoughts: although I’m happy with my purchase (assuming all goes well), I can’t help feeling ambivalent. Should I have spent more? What if I have to do this…? Wouldn’t it be nice to have something bright and shiny with all the latest specs? On the other hand, the thought of all the money I avoided spending makes me feels like I barely avoided a harrowing accident.

  • Preparing for Fedora Core 5

    In February I’ll be buying a laptop and slapping Fedora Core 4 on it. Unfortunately, it seems that FC 5 will be officially released in March, which means that a month after installation, I’ll have to install again from scratch.

    The FC solution is to create a separate partition for /home, leave user data on there while installing FC 5 will wipe out everything else. Well, duh!

    Here’s a fedora forum and a slashdot discussion about FC 5 including Mono .

    Windows users are facing a similar dilemma about how to plan for upgrade to Windows Vista. One comforting thing about the Windows Home Edition scare (see below) is to see that MS does a pretty good job establishing a timetable for how long each OS will be supported. As long as you do your research, you can prepare yourself.

  • Dell + linux + laptop

    Some resources: Dell linux community forum

    Dell Laptop yahoo group

    Jarod Wilson MythTV How to page (for FC4) and TV Tuners for linux laptops

  • Dealing with Non-Packaged Applications

    A power linux user ardently defends linux’s usability:

    I.a.1.: Dealing with non-packaged applications

    There is still the problem of applications not included as packages of your current distribution. Finding software is still much easier than on Windows, because you can look for it on Freshmeat or SourceForge or on Savannah, that is, on centralized repositories. The problem is installing tarballs. There are solutions for this problem, that this time belong to the Linux community instead of the end user maybe, but they’re don’t require any massive rewriting of core components.

    First solution, write a compiling packages helper. This requires not much more than being a simple text-based and/or GUI-based thing that gently unpackages the tarball, executes “./configure”, “make” and “make install” (or,better,”checkinstall”), and gently prompts any error encountered in a comprehensible way. (Hey, I just found the Python project I was looking for to cut my teeth on!) This still requires advanced feedback from the end user if something goes wrong, or if customization is needed, but if everything is right it would be nothing harder than an apt-get or a double-click installer.

    Second solution, distribute static binaries. If dependency hell is your problem, this is perhaps the best solution. I actually love the shared library concept, but I can see that has drawbacks. For big, common libraries like GTK or QT, they can actually be something that the user don’t want to install properly, because he/she won’t need them except than for one single app, and he/she wants to be sure that single app just works (so we don’t want to go into things like “it works with GTK 2.2.3 but not 2.4.1”). For obscure, little dependencies it can be a hell to find them, and it’s sad many good apps fall into oblivion just because they depend on a bunch of libnotinstalledonanysystem .so. Building static binaries would solve it: moreover static binaries will run happily compiled with their older libs if newer, not retro-compatible ones are already installed, allowing to avoid contorsionisms like installing KDE 2 libs on a KDE 3 system, for instance. I think it would be foolish to install and distribute static binaries only, but they should be presented as an option by all free software developers (and commercial too).

  • Ubuntu Everywhere!

    A man who gives away Ubuntu CDs in his Austin neighborhood–and people assume he’s a beggar!

    It was only after the morning rush that people actually seemed to read my sign and asked me what it was all about. Many judged that I had been hired by someone to do this thing I was doing. but in the 200 or so people in that day that actually spoke to me about what I was doing, only 9 knew anything about Linux. I gave away every disk that day. Those that took the time to speak to me were genuinely interested in the concept of a free operating system. All but a handful had the slightest clue that there was an alternative to Microsoft Windows. The thing that struck me most was the relief on their part when they found I wanted nothing from them.

    Linuxhelp weblog, a fun newbie-ish guide to using linux.

  • Wireless for the Linux Laptop (Part 3)

    Kernelnewbies, a site to explain linux kernel stuff for people. Here’s a faq page. Pardon me for being dense, but how do I decipher the numbering system for kernels? Aha, here’s a good reference guide.

    I’ve become slightly more optimistic about getting wireless support for a linux laptop. First, I think I understand my previous difficulties. I should have checked the Fedora kernel to see what kind of support was possible for wireless devices. Getting support compiled in is a lot more efficient than trying to get utilities like ndiswrapper to make it work.

    One of the problems is that the linux user base is already a select group; they don’t need as much hand-holding as the typical user (i.e., I) do. Because of this, many of the introductory steps are just not explained. Also, it’s difficult to verify beforehand that your hardware is compatible with whatever distribution you happen to be working with. Hardware support exists on the kernel level, not on the distribution’s frontend, so they just don’t provide information about support. (About the best idea I’ve seen is using a bootable Knoppix CD to test hardware compatibility before you actually install linux Hopefully in February or so I’ll have a full report of how ordinary users can make decisions for linux wireless to be a piece of cake.

    Here’s a user site/forum about linux-on-laptop. I just keep hearing better and better things about SUSE, ever since IBM declared them a “strategic partner” yesterday on slashdot.

    See also

  • Linux Wireless: The Helpless Fury (Part 2)

    (For casual readers: the post below describes my journey to make linux wireless networking work. The level of detail is not interesting, but I just wanted to illustrate how mired one can get in irrelevances just to troubleshoot one problem. If you are interested in linux usability, this level of detail might drive you crazy (just imagine what it’s done to me!). If so, you might find interesting Asa Dotzler’s itconversations talk about usability problems with the linux desktop. (Here’s his essay on the subject and the slashdot discussion).

    Two weeks ago I mentioned discovering the awful fact that Linux desktop users couldn’t get wireless networking to work without using ndiswrapper utility (some kludge that takes the Windows drivers and converts them into something linux can understand). (more…)

  • Open Usability Projects

    Strange I haven’t seen this before: openusability, a group of folks who do user testing of open source projects.

    Lots of linux-based projects, so I guess it goes with the territory. Here’s a ruby-based book collection desktop application, Alexandria.

    YAML, a data serialization method for data structures that can’t use tabs (python for example).

    I have a hundred posts to catch up on.

  • Ndiswrapper and Linux: Woe is Me! (Part 1)

    People trying vainly to get linux boxes connected to a wireless router shudder with horror when they hear this word “ndiswrapper”. That’s apparently the only lameass way to connect linksys wireless adaptors in linux. Here’s a good tutorial about how to do this. Here’s a step-by-step set of instructions and a comprehensive list of drivers for each card.

    This is utter madness. I actually googled my network adaptor before buying it, but apparently gentoo doesn’t include ndiswrapper support in their LiveCD. I probably will be wiping my half-installed gentoo machine clean and just installing Fedora, but apparently the same issue exists with all linux distributions.

    Apparently orinoco wireless adaptors are supported natively in linux. More about that here.

  • Software for Free/Software to Buy

    Photoshoppish keystroke shortcuts for gimp. Cool. It’s funny. I’m not a bigtime graphics creator by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve been using the gimp version of windows for about a year or two. At first, it was a bit of a struggle, but now it’s becoming almost effortless. I haven’t really tried to do anything fancy, but I’m learning things a little at a time.

    The advantage of learning open source tools is being able to parlay your knowledge into any work environment you find yourself in. Sure, Photoshop is the flagship graphics program, but how often can you count on a company having a Photoshop license (or more relevantly, be willing to buy a license for YOU)?

    Working in the high tech world is about leveraging/transferring your knowledge into new situations. Pydev may not be the best Python IDE; on the other hand, it happens to be a IDE my dayjob company is developing for, and one which I can pretty much expect other software companies to know about or use.

    I make exceptions sometimes. Here’s the software licenses I have bought in the past year or two:

    1. Abby Finereader ($150-200)–top of the line Windows OCR program for Project Gutenberg scanning. Time is money!
    2. Oxygen XML Editor ( academic/noncommercial license 75$)…..platform neutral XML Editor. Not the best for docs, but still, lots of functionality.
    3. RSS Radio ($15) great and easy RSS podcast downloader. Quite frankly, I had a lot of problems getting the free podcast programs to work, and this was the easiest.
    4. I would consider buying the WingIDE Personal program ($40) just to compare productivity with Pydev (and because it allegedly allows remote Zope debugging, which would be really cool).
    5. Dreamweaver MX (paid $200 on academic license). Useful at the time, not necessary now.
    6. StyleMaster CSS Editor ($60). Great program, unfortunately only for Windows. Makes Dreamweaver unneccessarily for basic web design.
    7. Also, because I use NotePadLight heavily as my main text editor, I am seriously considering paying the $30 or so dollars for the Pro version.
    8. Breeno Ebook organizer ($15). Powerful windows only ebook organizer and converter.
    9. I will probably get Vegas 6 when I start editing video (though I’d like to try the linux/open source equivalents at some point).
    10. Pocket Informant: POcket PC Organizer program (30$)
    11. Sprite Backup ($30) for backing up PDAs.

    Free Productivity Programs

    1. NotepadLight
    2. Gimp
    3. OpenOffice–mainly for its spreadsheet more than anything else
    4. Pydev
    5. Winmerge
    6. obviously, a lot of others that are less about productivity but utilities (Putty, etc)
    7. Audacity, CDEx, Winamp

  • glsa-check and linux Security

    Recently, I’ve been busy trying to build a gentoo web server. I’m going to be more pro-active about fighting zombies this time.

    Here’s a post about my security questions

    Perhaps the most interesting thing about the response is hearing about glsa-check, a way of determining which ebuilds are absolutely necessary from a security point of view.

    Here’s an extremely long-winded post about how to prevent your linux box from being hacked. As a programmer/writer, I really can’t spend all day hackproofing my box (and that alas is a good argument for hosting through a third party). On the other hand, there are a lot of good tricks listed here that I could implement fairly easily. My big concern is not really loss of data but zombification. Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to block any pings from China or India (!).

    There are a lot of good suggestions of the obvious kind (which never occurred to me). Such as putting sshd on a nonstandard port or allowing ssh logins only through private keys which you carry with you on your USB keychain (or tcp/ip wrappers to restrict ssh access to only certain IP addresses). I’m going to go back to Brian Hatch’s Hacking Linux Exposed for more ideas. Frankly though, I think system security and programming often have conflicting goals. At some point, the content creator has to stop worrying about sys admin stuff and just focus on producing stuff (and delegate the responsibility to a third party). Security people are paid to be paranoid and conservative at the same time, but the content creator has to test new things which are by nature risky.

    I’ve had some long stretches of time offline (if you check my weblog archives you can see when they were). I’ve learned the hard way that the only way to prevent long bouts of downtime is to have a mirrored server on another machine (with data rsynced back and forth) that I can switch to in the event of failure or major maintenance. When you have a dayjob, responding to a server problem often takes a long time. Although gentoo has fixed the linux updating problem, it’s constantly updating ebuilds, so much that it becomes a pain in the neck.

    Basically the solution to my problem is: 1)mirroring on another server, 2)more aggressive security updates, 3)better backup automation, and 4)far better logging than I’ve been doing.

    Quite frankly, I’m now acting under the assumption that my current web server is unsafe, and it’s not even worth the trouble to fix except a totally new install.

    Later: Flavio’s 10 Tips for Hardening a Linux Server.

  • Managing Plone Setups with Subversion

    Great post by Matt Rohrer about how to install and maintain plone using Subversion. Lots of tips.

    Version control with subversion for nonprogrammers. By Keith R. Fieldhouse. More tips on checking in/out with subversion by Limi. Still More tips by Tom Lazar and specifically on plone’s quills. Jens Klein on how to check out plone/collective things via subversion . Just to go overboard, here’s zope’s faq about subversion. and subclipse, en eclipse plugin for subversion.

    Two other links: a crash course in subversion (chapters from a book by Garrett Rooney) and the official Subversion doc later made into an Oreilly book.
    I’m really going to rely on subversion for my new web server. I’ll be building it in the next week or two.

  • Engineers or Lawyers?

    From a roundup article Grant Gross on the Grokster case (scheduled to be heard March 29)

    “The question really boils down to, will America’s technology companies be hiring more engineers, or will they be firing engineers and hiring lawyers instead?” von Lohmann said.

  • OpenWRT

    Openwrt, linux firmware for extending the capabilities of a wireless access port.