This is mostly a note to my future self, or to some googling Ubuntu user in a similar situation. When I upgraded my Sony Vaio PCG-TR3A laptop recently from Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Hardy Heron (8.04) with a fresh install, most things just worked with no tweaking, but sound did not. After trying some of the suggestions at the Ubuntu wiki's Debugging Sound Problems page, I fixed the sound by installing gnome-alsamixer, launching it, and de-selecting the External Amplifier switch.

I finally got my dedicated DSL line up and working! The line itself has been working for several days, but it took me a while—and a long cell phone call to Speakeasy, with a self-righteous dollop of "No, I'm not running Windows or a Mac"—to figure out that my DSL modem wanted a crossover cable instead of straight-through cat5.

Now if I can just figure out how to merge my (mboxy-looking) Evolution mail folders with the (mbox) mutt ones...

I upgraded a laptop and desktop from Ubuntu Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft in the past week. Both upgrades fizzled due to the Yudit package having installed things in /usr/X11R6/bin/, but after some manual intervention the upgrades eventually completed. I haven't noticed many differences yet, just that GNOME seems a little more polished and Firefox displays a limited number of tabs at a time—beyond that limit, the user has to scroll back and forth among them. Being a tab fiend, I'm annoyed by that new feature but haven't yet figured out how to disable it.

In the very near future, I'll be able to say that my job involves Linux (and not just spacecraft)! I'll be embarking with a small team on a two-month exploratory effort to install RTLinux on an MCP750 chip (similar to the space-qualified and therefore very expensive RAD750). Once we get it running and set up a credible development environment, we plan to roughly simulate the kind of processing that would happen on a spacecraft's main processor(s), maybe including intensive tasks like data compression and guidance-and-control algorithms.

We're aware of the FlightLinux project that was completed several years ago, but it's not entirely clear how the status of Linux in space has changed since then. I'm starting a web page to keep track of various missions and efforts; if you know of any that aren't listed, please tell me about them!

A Linux Journal article on the use of Linux in NRL's TacSat-1 sounds promising; next month we expect to hear whether we'll get the go-ahead on a proposal to partner with them in some more of this sort of Linux-in-space research.

My laptop's hard drive is on its last legs. It seemed to be deteriorating ever since last month's Europe jaunt, but at this point I'm just trying to salvage what I can while I wait for the new one I just ordered. (I particularly want it in working order by the time I leave for a conference a week from today.) It's currently got Fedora Core 4 and Windows XP partitions. While FC4 was okay, I think I'll install either Ubuntu or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on the next reincarnation. I've had good experiences recently with Ubuntu on other machines. I haven't used SUSE recently, but one reviewer gushed, “SLED 10 is hands down the most polished desktop Linux distribution I’ve ever used—and that includes Ubuntu.”

The great weather over the past few days has led me to spend more time out in my back yard despite my computer problems. Here you see the first tomato plants I've ever grown. I also spotted a frog hanging out on the edge of the pond, which is great to see, since I've been making an effort to maintain the pond and keep it out of its scummy, frogless state of the past few summers.

Other lazy-weekend activities: reading, sipping iced barley tea, relaxing in a hammock chair, eating out at Dino (vanilla gelato topped with aged balsamic vinegar—who knew?), working on another kobukusa (see earlier entry), and realizing that the much-awaited-by-me A Scanner Darkly isn't yet playing in my area.

Ever since I did an apt-get dist-upgrade on my virtual server (Debian unstable), it has been dying almost every day. Tech support tells me it has run out of memory when I call them to have it reset. I don't see anything incriminating in /var/log/messages. It hasn't run out of hard disk space. A quick look at top has me noticing a bunch of forked mysqld processes, and I could go diving into all kinds of mysqld status variables—none of which I've ever tweaked—but without some evidence of what process is causing the problem, it's a wild goose chase. I tried asking tech support if they had any information beyond "ran out of RAM" that could help me diagnose the problem, but they keep trying to sell me more RAM. :(

I'll have to choose between two conferences next July: the linux conference I've attended for the past few years, or a new conference on spaceflight software. At one I'd be sure to know people and know my way around; the other is more relevant to my chosen field. Why do they have to take place at the same time?

Poll #614689
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Where should I go next July?

Gentoo is annoying me. It's the distro I run on my desktop PC, and what annoys me about it is its tendency to cause things to break after routine software updates. I spent some time yesterday evening trying to get X working, which it hasn't done in many weeks. The solution seemed to be the removal of ~/.Xauthority, and possibly the removal of some lines in /etc/security/pam_env.conf. But before I could even think of tackling that problem, I faced another: upon reboot, many of the important device files in /dev/, including hda3, did not exist. Mild panic. Googling turned up the fix: emerge devfsd. So things more or less work now, pending printer setup. I just have to keep remembering to set mutt_dotlock's sgid bit each time mutt is upgraded, because the ebuild doesn't do it automatically. I'm increasingly tempted to switch to Ubuntu, if it weren't for all the little problems that would inevitably turn up in the course of the change.

Remember that "Write a real, working Linux driver" tutorial I attended at OLS? With some help from the presenter, I've gotten the driver working! The sample shell script polls the temperature probe once a second and outputs its temperature reading in Fahrenheit and Celsius. Nifty.

So, tinkerers out there, do you want to try it too? I'll lend you the temperature probe, and I can point you to the slides from the tutorial as well as a tarball of all the code. For some background material, you can read the entire USB Drivers chapter (pdf) of the O'Reilly Linux Device Drivers book online.

Ah, the joys of using Linux in a Windows world. With a couple of Fedora Core 4 installations under my belt, I was pleased that many things just work. But of course the bulk of my attention goes to the many things that just don’t.

I’m trying to use Evolution as an Outlook replacement. I can interact with my inbox on the Exchange server with no problems. However, I can’t see my calendar at all. I push the ‘Calendars’ button, and I see a list of calendars in the pane above the buttons. The calendar view, to the right, is completely devoid of appointments. When I try to select one of the checkboxes corresponding to a calendar, a status message ‘Opening exchange://myusername@domain@server/personal/Calendar (...)’ appears at the bottom of the window for a fraction of a second, as does a checkmark in the checkbox I clicked, but both disappear quickly. It’s so odd. And aggravating.

I did just now manage to mount my Windows partition, after installing the NTFS kernel module. Yea for that.

Fedora automounts my iPod Mini, but I’m at a loss when I get to gtkpod. It tells me iPod Database Import Failed: ‘Illegal seek to offset 654644 (length 4) in file ’/media/ipod/iPod_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB’.‘

I’d like to be able to print to networked printers, but I haven’t been able to locate them using printconf-gui.

Fedora ships a version of xscreensaver without any graphics demos. Granted, it gives you a perfectly functional blank screen, but for anyone who’s used xscreensaver before and expects to be presented with a list of graphics demos to choose from, it looks like a bug.

As for video, I tried to watch the Quicktime clip of Cisco ripping out the pages of Michael Lynn’s presentation on Cisco’s critical vulnerabilities, but neither Totem nor Helix, the two video players Fedora installs, come with Quicktime decoders. I installed a succession of GStreamer plugins before finding the module that decodes .movs: gstreamer-ffmpeg.

Linux admin-y things have been going well for me lately. Last night I upgraded my laptop from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 4. No particular reason—obviously I don't adhere to the truism “if it ain't broke, don't fix it”—but it seemed the world had already moved on to 3, so why not get the latest? The installation went smoothly, once I realized that I had to pass it the askmethod option at the boot prompt in order to perform a network install. (Is that method not very popular? I thought enough people would have broadband by now that network installation would overtake installation by disc(s).) I haven't played around with it enough to give it a real review, though I had seen Tuxtops's “cold” review of it. I had to re-setup widescreen LCD support and recompile the wireless driver, which I discovered required me to install kernel-devel first. The GNOME menus are arranged a little differently, so it took me some time to find the configuration menu where I could swap the Caps Lock and Ctrl keys.

On my Gentoo box, I finally got the updated gnome-vfs to compile. It had been stuck for weeks, insisting on using some i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc file that it couldn't find. This was my payback for futzing with /etc/make.conf to get some long-forgotten other software to compile. After breaking various things, I made sure I was consistently telling Portage that this was an i686 box, not an i486, it still gave me the same error. The solution seems to have been emerge libIDL, followed by fix_libtool_files.sh whenever the compiler complained about some missing library. Whew. That was annoying.

Lastly, I noticed the other day that my mailserver had over six thousand messages in its queue. (thedreadpilot and I are the only users on that server—it's pretty small-scale.) Mostly they were undeliverable messages for a domain with which I have a secondary MX exchange but whose mailserver hasn't been responsive for a while. I removed that host from rcpthosts, set all the messages in the queue to reach their queuelifetime, and watched as messages bounced after one more delivery attempt were dropped from the queue, which is now an order of magnitude smaller. That freed up a significant amount of disk space.

Next on the agenda is making sure I know how to build, install, and run a standard kernel.org kernel so I can participate in the Linux driver-writing tutorial at OLS this year.

Every so often I like to screw up my web/email server, just for fun. Yesterday was one of those times. This is a virtual server running Debian, a mix of stable and testing. I was doing a little apt-get upgrade, and I noticed it wanted to upgrade exim, which I didn't think I have any need for—qmail is my MTA. So I went and removed exim, realizing too late that somehow apache depends on exim (why?) and so apache, apache-ssl, and apache-common were all un-installed too. Oops.

So apt-get install apache apache-ssl apache-common, right? Not quite. It insisted on reading /etc/apache/conf.d/ for its config-files, which is not where they actually were or had ever been, and I couldn't figure out why it was insisting on this. Eventually I just copied everything in /etc/apache/ (where my config-files were) to /etc/apache/conf.d/. After I did that, apache warned me about trying to load lots of modules that were already loaded, and, more seriously, it didn't recognize config-file directives like Alias, Order, Deny, or ExtendedStatus. Huh?

The solution involved a bunch of steps that are a little hazy, but this is what I remember:

• dpkg --purge apache apache-common apache-ssl (after backing up /etc/apache/ and /etc/apache-ssl/)
  
• Then re-installed apache, apache-common, and apache-ssl.
  
• Merged my backup config-files and the new ones.
  
• I changed my sources.list from a combination of stable and testing to all unstable, since a lot of my scripts needed non-ancient versions of PHP and stuff.
  
• I had to (re-)add extension=mysql.so to /etc/php4/apache/php.ini.