Well, as it turns out my linux adventure is on hold. I used Ubuntu for a least two whole weeks at work and I've discovered a few things that I don't like.
Since I mostly do java development, I really want to use Eclipse. Eclipse on windows is very easy for me. I've been using it for at least a year and half now. I got used to everything that was different from other IDEs and I liked it. On linux, it is a little bit different. My biggest complaint and what would likely keep me from using it further on linux is that the user interface has too much empty space. It feels like I can see much more code on my laptop in windows than in linux. That is the primary annoyance there. It sounds petty, but it is enough for me to reconsider using it. If I hadn't used the windows version, I'm sure that it would be fine.
The other aspect is that at work, we have to use smart cards to log in now. Linux users are excepted right now, so we don't have to login with smart cards, but we are totally locked out of email without the use of a windows box. That gets quite annoying too. I managed to get the card working in Firefox so that I could access work websites finally, but I'm still tempted with fiddling around instead of doing real work.
That turns out to be my biggest linux complaint. Its almost too open for me because I can't control myself and do work. Instead I feel compelled to figure how change this or update that. Why isn't this working? and Oh, I finally figured that out. I am keeping it aroung and trying to login once a week. I'll give it another try in a few weeks. Its just right now we have big deadlines and linux isn't platform we need to deliver. That sounds silly I suppose, but its just taking me a really long time to get happy with the way everything works. Since it is a work computer, that time investment is totally unjustified.
I'm going to try to stay mostly computer oriented here for now I think. We'll see how it goes.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Ubuntu adventures
Well, there are two things...
First, I spent a long time on getting the wireless connection active. The biggest problem seems to be that with WPA enabled and using a Intel Centrino 2200 wireless connection, the default Ubuntu 6.06 installer is a little confused. The card itself works right out of the box and the wireless connection was there, but it wouldn't connect to my network because I had WPA-PSK enabled. As it turns out, the biggest trick was that you have to make absolutely certain that the ssid that you type in is exactly the same "case" as the actual ssid value. Also, even though Windows calls the information you enter a password to connect to the network with WPA, the wpa_supplicant calls it a passphrase.
The solution I used was to make changes to my /etc/network/interfaces file. My wireless card was called eth1.
The file already contained...
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
..and then I added immediately below it...
wpa-ssid
wpa-passphrase
Then I did an sudo ifdown eth1
Then sudo ifup eth1 and done.
Yes, I'm aware that this ins't the most secure or flexible option, but it works for me now. I'll investigate further when it becomes a problem later, like at a public open AP. :)
Secondly, I made my machine a dual boot (it even works with Windows Vista beta 2) with Ubuntu 6.06 and a version of windows. The simplest thing to do is, with a blank harddrive, install windows into only one partition by making at least two partitions before you choose to install windows. Make sure that the second partition is big enough for the linux install. Install windows. Then install linux into the other partition. The safest thing for me was to manually partition the second partition into swap and home and root. Once installed and booted into, then make a backup of your /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Then sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add the windows installation into the list using the example in the file as a guideline and uncommenting the hiddenmenu option. You might also want to increase the delay to 5 seconds or more, just in case you forget about it the next time. Then save the file.
The next time you reboot, if you edited the menu.lst file properly, should show Windows in your list of choices. At least for Vista beta2, the windows bootloader couldn't find c:\windows\boot\winloader.exe anymore, so I used the install CD for Windows to repair it. After the repair, the computer can now boot in to either OS just fine.
Eventually, I'll add this stuff to the Ubuntu wiki, but I lazily didn't feel like taking the time.
First, I spent a long time on getting the wireless connection active. The biggest problem seems to be that with WPA enabled and using a Intel Centrino 2200 wireless connection, the default Ubuntu 6.06 installer is a little confused. The card itself works right out of the box and the wireless connection was there, but it wouldn't connect to my network because I had WPA-PSK enabled. As it turns out, the biggest trick was that you have to make absolutely certain that the ssid that you type in is exactly the same "case" as the actual ssid value. Also, even though Windows calls the information you enter a password to connect to the network with WPA, the wpa_supplicant calls it a passphrase.
The solution I used was to make changes to my /etc/network/interfaces file. My wireless card was called eth1.
The file already contained...
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
..and then I added immediately below it...
wpa-ssid
wpa-passphrase
Then I did an sudo ifdown eth1
Then sudo ifup eth1 and done.
Yes, I'm aware that this ins't the most secure or flexible option, but it works for me now. I'll investigate further when it becomes a problem later, like at a public open AP. :)
Secondly, I made my machine a dual boot (it even works with Windows Vista beta 2) with Ubuntu 6.06 and a version of windows. The simplest thing to do is, with a blank harddrive, install windows into only one partition by making at least two partitions before you choose to install windows. Make sure that the second partition is big enough for the linux install. Install windows. Then install linux into the other partition. The safest thing for me was to manually partition the second partition into swap and home and root. Once installed and booted into, then make a backup of your /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Then sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add the windows installation into the list using the example in the file as a guideline and uncommenting the hiddenmenu option. You might also want to increase the delay to 5 seconds or more, just in case you forget about it the next time. Then save the file.
The next time you reboot, if you edited the menu.lst file properly, should show Windows in your list of choices. At least for Vista beta2, the windows bootloader couldn't find c:\windows\boot\winloader.exe anymore, so I used the install CD for Windows to repair it. After the repair, the computer can now boot in to either OS just fine.
Eventually, I'll add this stuff to the Ubuntu wiki, but I lazily didn't feel like taking the time.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
FreeNAS
Paul and I (well mostly Paul since he's the one who wanted to use it) spent some time on Saturday exploring setting up FreeNAS on an older P2/333 machine so that he could use it as a NAS box. FreeNAS is a FreeBSD distribution that has a minimal interface and OS service set to support just file sharing and configuration of shares. It seems to work pretty well now. We had a couple of concerns about the filesystems and the installation and stuff, but he now has a NAS box with about 130GB of storage in it. The issues we had were just a few things. First, with the latest release image, the CDROM drive in his computer wasn't detected properly. It sounds like that shouldn't be a problem except that since the CD was detected, the installation aborted. We went back a few releases to 0.6.0 and that version seems to be working just fine. NTFS doesn't work with the installation as a read/write filesystem. He tried to reformated to FAT and FAT32 but the OS complained that the disk was too large. Its for the better anyway because FAT32 isn't a very efficient format for large disks. He ended up formatting UFS instead. That worked just fine. Then he setup CIFS so that Windows could see the drives as shares.
Monday, May 08, 2006
More photos
I put an album of the ocho rios, jamaica part of our honeymoon up so that I could see them from the Tivo. So the Yahoo Photo stuff I like because of Tivo access, but I like flickr because I like its interface better.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Some photos that are available.
I think I'm going to go with flickr. I started with trying picasa which is how I ended up here. It worked, but not as I expected. So I tried Yahoo photo. You can see some of the photos I posted here.
Then I tried flickr, which is apparently owned by Yahoo anyway, and I think I like it. Here are the photos, but you'll have to join, I think to see the photos because I didn't want them publicly indexed.
Then I tried flickr, which is apparently owned by Yahoo anyway, and I think I like it. Here are the photos, but you'll have to join, I think to see the photos because I didn't want them publicly indexed.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
a 4 picture limit?
That's interesting. Maybe I'll give something else a try. I definitely didn't look in to this too far, so maybe I'm just doing something wrong. Whatever.
The Chandler
We couldn't believe the room that we were staying in, so we tried to get a picture of us in the room. ...And then we went nuts taking pictures. The room was amazing!
The hotel prepared a chilled bottle of champagne for us...
They turned down the bed and set out robes for us to use...
We even had fancy chocolates to eat. 
Back from the honeymoon...
Since the idea here was for me to post some pictures from our honeymoon and our wedding, i'll try giving that a shot.
First Post!!!
Its really deep, isn't it? I just thought of slashdot as I typed it. I really just created this to make it possible to share picasa photos.
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