Month: January 2009

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A Word About Ubuntu Forums

I’ve had remarkably good experiences, for the most part, finding helpful information on the Ubuntu Forums site when I ran into something puzzling about the OS that wasn’t readily dealt with via my normal troubleshooting efforts. I’ve seen some threads where some self-important twit mocked folks for asking for help in a manner they felt was beneath them to answer, but only rarely. I’d never experienced something like that myself until today. A quick crosspost:

Quote:Originally Posted by mnmus

I have a similar problem. Yesterday, Nautilus reported over 221GiB gree space on my drive (out of a nominal 400gig drive with a little over 20gig reserved for swap file/extended. (GParted has never seen more than about 380GiB of that, normal for drive/OS)

Today, after applying recommended updates (mostly security-related, IIRC), I can do very little as Nautilus reports 0 bytes free space on the drive. That means, of course, that Thunderbird won’t download mail–or even allow me to delete mail, and anything that requires any disk space usage–apart from swap file, apparently, is an exercise in futility. Heck, my saved sessions in Opera and Firefox disappeared, as well.

Oh, GParted reports that I have about 10GiB free apart from swap space, out of the ~362GiB it sees on my primary partition… quite a bit less than the 221GiB available yesterday.

Additional pieces of the puzzle:

Nautilus reports only 137.2GiB of files, adds that “some contents are unreadable”–something like another couple hundred GiB “unreadable”?

*sigh* I’ve had petty lil things regularly go south after updates (sound, video, etc.) but never a couple hundred gig of storage just go *poof!* before. For something like this, I’d almost switch back to *shudder* Windows. (More likely, I’d back up my Home folder to an external drive, nuke Ubuntu and install Puppy Linux, Suse Linux, PC-BSD–even though importing my data might be a lil less straightforward–or something else equally well-behaved, instead of what has turned out to be a very cranky Ubuntu… *profound sigh*).

Any suggestions about what the heck is going on?

The time it took you to post this long whining post, you could have posted the outputs of those commands in my previous reply. Then, somebody could have figured out what’s wrong with your disk space!

Indeed, the guy who responded to my post is correct: I could have posted the information he referred to; in fact, I already had it on hand. But. That same jackass had told the originator of the thread I posted to to post the same information… two weeks ago. The thread originator had done so and… *crickets chirping* Mr. Jackass had made no further reply in that time. Indeed, had Mr. Jackass been paying any attention, he’d have seen that the major information resulting from the suggested commands was already contained in my post, just confirmed from other apps within the GUI.

I’m glad of one thing. The above took place online. If the jackass had sneered in my face like that in person, I might be having to find a place to hide the body. *heh* OK, so maybe not. ONE of us would likely be looking for a place to hide the body… 🙂 Well, perhaps not, but he’d sure feel like he had had a new anal orifice installed… (because the one he is using to form words with is past due for replacement).

And it still leaves my issue unadressed: how the heck to I access my hard drive space? Oh, I can access it using root priviledges, either from the command line or by invoking Nautilus with root priviledges, but that doesn’t help if I want to create a text file or a spreadsheet or even check my mail using Thunderbird–or even save a session in one of my browsers.

Here’s a tiny little piece of the puzzle. Nautilus, reporting after deleting a little over 30GiB of no longer needed data and programs, now reports an awesome 1.4GiB free space!

free-space

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Maleable words

So, after two–regularly scheduled–days off, Son&Heir drove in to work on (state) roads that are clear of ice. That our street, and the streets connecting to the first state road here around America’s Third World County Central, are still sheet ice covered with packed snow is immaterial: he can drive on three day old stuff like that. It’s a 30-minute drive, but traffic’s usually only bumper-to-bumper for about 2.5-3.0 miles of it, so it’s not too bad.

Of course, fellow “workers” who live right down the street from his place of employment “couldn’t make it in” and so he’s alone at work today.

He says he now knows why that town’s motto is, “Come to visit; come to stay”. Because the roads are so bad you can’t get out. I’m thinking it may be another reason: because staying too long makes folks too stupid and lazy to find a route out.

Interesting motto. Lots of ways it could be read…

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Shadetree Tech: Dreadlock Wigs and Chicken Bone Rattles

“Make the world go away… ” Thanks Eddie Arnold (and Hank Cochran) for that thought. In that spirit, no politics, social commentary or whatever from the “news” here, just play time for (low) techies.

Think back to “shadetree mechanics” and… begin.

Some of the fun of playing around with computers is attempting to use them–and “(in)appropriate” peripherals–for purposes they weren’t originally intended for. Now, we’ve all done that with computers from time to time: made them into hardware firewalls/routers, print servers, doorstops, boat anchors, shelving supports and more–or at least I assume we’ve all done so. *heh*

Ran across a neat lil peripheral recently as the result of some printing woes here at twc central. Background: because I’m a cheap, tightwad of a curmudgeon, I decreed some time ago that we all simply share one printer on the network (nice to be the potentate ruling my own domain *heh*). Currently, that printer is a nice HP AIO with memory card reader that’ll catch the memory cards from any (digital) camera in the house, scan, copy, print, etc. Then, along came my (completely unnecessary) upgrade of Ubuntu from 8.04 to 8.10. Since the printer at issue is connected to this computer (I have the largest desk, so by default EVERYTHING gravitates to it), naturally sharing ANYTHING–not just the printer–died with the upgrade.

*sigh* I fixed network shares pretty easily, except for the printer. Went right down the line by “the book”–no joy. Went off book with a vengeance. No joy. Hassled with the thing off and on for a couple of days and gave in and bought the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit. Got my confirmation email from amazon.com that it had been shipped.

Shazam!! Printer magically appeared on other computers as shared.

Isn’t that the way it always works? Better than wearing a dreadlock wig and shaking a chicken bone rattle while mumbling arcana and dancing around, perhaps shrieking like a bansidhe* to boot. Just buy something to fix a problem and the problem disappears. *heh*

So, now I have the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit and no need for it. What to do? Go ahead and screw up the working network printing by installing the kit and then spending days getting IT working? (Altogether too likely *heh*) I don’t think so. So, what else is the thing good for?

Looked at the thing. Can’t tell anything from the outside, so just thought over what topology the kit would have to introduce/fit into to work as advertised. Checked out the “advanced” setup mini-micro-nano-information on the CD concerning using the thing on an existing wireless network. *heh* “Looks like it’s just an access point and a wireless adapter the software configures for the printer use,” me thought. Plugged the part that looks like a thumb drive or wireless network adapter for a n otebook into this computer, enabled wireless networking, entered the network key and… bob’s your uncle. (Of course, enabling wireless networking has meant the wireless connection has usurped my network connection from my wired ethernet, but since the MIMO capabilities on my Netgear WPN824 seem to be used by the lil wireless adapter, I’m getting very nearly the same throughput I do with wired ethernet.)

Next up: installing the unit designed for (USB) attachment to the printer to the network elsewhere (say, an old XBox, using an already adapted XBox cable–a simple hardware hack) and see if it’ll act as the wireless access point it would seem it is. Heck, I might get more use out of this for entertainment value than by using it for its intended purpose. And, if networked printing goes south on me again, I can always pop this lil puppy out and install it for its intended purpose, eh?

Now, how can I retask that old 2.5′ tall P-II server I had made into a router/firewall… Ahhh! Attach it to the network as a subnet and play with the lil kit items on it. Hey! Might be able to make that back into my primary router/firewall, since its firewall capabilities exceed similar functions in the Netgear router…

All kinds of fun to keep me occupied away from getting more important stuff done, if I want it to let it. 😉

(Yes, this post does indicate I’m semi-sorta-kinda “icebound” for now. Just do not want to navigate the hill out of our lil neighborhood on the sheet ice I walked earlier.)

*”Bansidhe”–Don’t complain to me about the spelling! Complain to the bansidhes, if you dare! Spell it “banshee” if you want, but don’t come running to me if you wake up with one of ’em shrieking under your window at night because of your inconsiderate spelling…

Note to any bansidhes reading this: I really, really need my sleep, and I tried to discourage folks from disrespectful spellings referencing your class, so lay off, OK? 😉

Do check out Linkfest Haven Deluxe for the latest, greatest linkfests.

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“…like the ice storm of 2007… “

That’s the comment from an email from the desk of the county’s school superintendent that caught my eye. I hope not, since I have procrastinated getting our stand of sycamores trimmed back, and the deadfalls (well, they were dead after they were pulled down from the trees) from the last ice storm are still “in process,” getting cut up for different lil (and not so little) furniture projects. Oh, and then there’s the whole deadfalls taking-out-POTS-line and spiking through storage shed roof thing. Some of ’em last time were bigger in diameter than my thighs. Much bigger. The lil being without power for a few weeks (and water much of that time) wasn’t a patch on the cleanup.

At least the electric company has been vigorously and regularly trimming trees since the last power outage. Now, instead of ice on the lines AND massive chunks of lines downed by trees, it’s only iced lines that are a potential issue. Much better.

Looking forward to cleanup. *sigh* Oh. Well. I need the exercise.

On another note, neither of our children were living here at the time of the last major ice storm. Lovely Daughter was living 35 miles south and Son&Heir 35 miles north (still in college). This time, both are working down south. Roads Not Good. Lovely Daughter has a place to stay for the evening. Son&Heir does too, but he’s waffling about staying/coming back when he gets off around 10:00. We strongly recommended staying over. Strongly. I’ve slid a car off the road on black ice (traveling under 30mph… more than 30 years ago), under better conditions than he’d be driving in. Our neighborhood streets are solid ice, now, and WILL NOT be scraped/sanded until at least tomorrow, so sliding off the road (and into a neighbor’s front room) on the way down the hill to a sharp hairpin onto our street’s not out of range of the possible. We’ve had a couple of cars slide off the road that’s up a 15′ 80-degree hill above our street slide off the street and down into our front yard in years past, so it’s not inconceiveable. Don’t want to get a call to come collect him out of a bar ditch.

Oh, well. He’s living here, but he’s his own adult and can make his own decisions.

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Here’s the problem…

The problem with government solving our problems–whether it’s a government of kings and dukes and earls or a government of presidents and senators and congressmen–is that rulers “fix” problems to suit themselves.

Ponder that one, Pinky.

Words to chill the soul:

“I’m from the government; I’m here to help.”

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Deliverance!

Some few of y’all may recall the saga of our “bad neighbors”–multiple calls to the police/sheriff’s department for rowdyism, driving over our lawn with their trucks, dogs running loose, late night-early morning loud, drunken parties on their front lawn, racing down the street, etc.

They’re finally gone. A new couple has moved in. Don’t really know him past “Howdy” but she’s a teller at the local bank and has been for about eight years. Stable, nice folks. Greeted me by name when I took a couple of small baskets of cherry tomatoes over to see who’d moved in (even if they’d not liked tomatoes–they do–it was a good excuse to drop by, ya know?). They moved in while I was having a busy schedule over the past week out and about, so I didn’t get to carry any furniture, as some of our neighbors did when we moved in 15 years ago. Bummer. So a few cherry tomatoes were the least I could drop by, eh? Yeh, yeh, I shoulda baked bread or muffins or something, but when I took a cherry pie to the gals at the bank (yes, even the manager’s a woman) I didn’t bake it myself. Baking’s not my gig.

*whew!* Hail and farewell.

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It’s the Little Things…

Interesting week. Little things, mostly compy-related.

My dad–aged 85–called up with a boot issue. Pretty smart guy sbout this stuff, especially for someone who spent better than 70 years before ever even being exposed to using one of the things. Followed directions well and we traced the problem very quickly to a dead CMOS battery. Sent him pictures, a diagram and instructions and he was cool with the whole thing, *heh* Gives him a reason to play with his grounding strap.

On the other end of the spectrum, the guy that was on the other end of the line when my dad first called is clueless about computers. I picked his up the next day. His WinXP install was well and truly trashed, and the only real fixes were to either hope a repair install fixed things or a complete reinstall. Since he didn’t have the original WinXP install CD, I dug a lil further. Yep. Was not going to shell out one of MY licenses to reinstall Windows (his “license” was… apparently a lil hinky). When the repair install failed, I eschewed attempting a reinstallation using the product key it’d been installed with and just installed Puppy Linux for him, since he insisted all he used the thing for was surfing and email–and there was NOTHING in any email store for any email client, so he meant all webmail.

[Edit: his response when I got it back to him and set up: “It’s never been this fast!” Of course not, it was dragging one of the Queen Elizabeth’s anchors (WinXP) behind it all the way… Even his online java gaming was faster. But, a caveat for folks who do need java/java plugins. Installing/enabling java/java plugins is not all that straightforward in Puppy Linux and involves a LOT of typing at the command line, although some of that can be relieved by some creative mousing–something I was reduced to because of my typo-laden command line “skills” *heh* Still, dragging a plugin or executable to create a hard link where one is needed is easier than typing a long string into the command line and avoids easily-created errors, so I’m not ashamed to admit doing it. 🙂 Configuring browsers to use java after all the background installation and links to plugins has been done is a trivial task, though.]

Puppy’s ideal for him anyway, since the computer is a 700Mhz box with only 256MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive almost full of programs he never used because they were “inaccessible” to the WinXP that’d been installed over Win98. I don’t imagine he’s got any complaint with running Puppy instead of WinXP, since WinXP had been installed over what was there when he got it from a dump.

Oh, finally got my first opportunity of 2009 to help my Wonder Woman down at one of her libraries, yesterday afternoon. She wanted to move her office computer to the other side of the room from her desk, but keep her monitor, keyboard and mouse on her desk. Easy-peasy. A looooong monitor cable extension (about 2+X the diameter of her original monitor cable, with a humongous amount of shielding, etc.) routed around the wall took care of the monitor issue. Since her office computer’s a Gateway (a very nice, very capable P4 that is several orders of magnitude better than the Dells the school system bought for student use in the libraries), I found her a nice Gateway RF wireless mouse/keyboard combo. Took more time moving and re-routing cables, bundling things up in wire loom, etc., than you might think, but at the end, actualized the mouse/keyboard and she was away to the races.

Fun. (Oh, I bought a second set for me, so I can slide back a few feet, put my feet up on my keyboard drawer and–with a lil “mousing table” nearby–set Opera to 200% and laze through an eBook. *heh* Places the monitor 6′ or better away from my eyes, but really easy easy to read that way.

*heh* I just love freebies. Someone asked me to evaluate using a DirectTV R15 receiver for an offlist purpose. It didn’t work out and I let ’em know why. Emailed me back: “Keep the thing.” Now I have a spare 160GB hard drive, pulled from it. Nice. And I know just where I’ll put it–as slave to an 80GB drive in an old 900Mhz system with 512MB memory. I’ll partition the things into 40GB partitions, I think so I can dual boot Puppy Linux and Windows 98. Maybe. I read an interesting article about virtualization with Puppy, so I might give that a shot. 512MB of memory is pretty slim to do virtualization with, IMO, but between the parsimony Puppy treats memory with and the relatively low memory needs of Win98, I might be able to do it.

Didn’t get to the P.O. until after 4:30 yesterday. I wonder what the package is that was too big for our box?

I’m running about 3-1 this week on answering machine messages on my POTS line as opposed to voicemail on my VOIP phone. Hmmm… If I dropped my POTS line, do you think more people would call my VOIP phone? I like having my messages emailed to me, since I’m almost always at a computer–either mine or someone else’s. I hate cell phone voicemail, and I keep my cell phone turned off ALL the time, unless I’m making calls, so my VOIP phone is “my” phone. Heck, I make more local calls on it than I do on our POTS line.

Oh, BTW, back at the Puppy Linux thing: installing Puppy Linux to a hard drive from the live CD is now a trivial operation. A little wizard just copies over the image from the live CD… though minus one critical element that must be “installed” separately, so booting that installation is something else. The GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) installation wizard isn’t quite as straighforward, definitely not “Aunt Tilly” ready, IMO. After a couple of tries using it, I just looked up the GRUB boot config file it had created and did a little editing to make the thing work. Notaproblem, really, but I don’t expect the “Aunt Tillies” of the world to go for that. Close, but no cigar.

OTOH, for someone who just surfs the web and does email, booting a live CD Puppy Linux session could be all the computer they need, and Aunt Tilly could handle that (once Nerdy Nephew ran the easy-peasy network wizard that does work well and shows her where to CLICK to install PET packaged software, in case she needs more than is in the standard installation).

Today: day of R&R and bumaround chores. First thing: pick up that package at the P.O. Then, grocery shopping, library and little things like that. Easy day. Maybe get an afternoon nap. I hope.

If I keep myself focused on the ordinary things of life, maybe I’ll not brood over the little things like The One being the very first newly-inaugurated president to skip out on the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball since it was begun 56 years ago… (h.t. MoreWhat) Whatabum.

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“The time has come to set aside childish things”

So intoned The One yesterday. To paraphrase the wisdom of Inego Montoya, “I do not think those words mean what you think they mean,” Mr. Obama. After all, isn’t this man, photographed at your inauguration yesterday, your carefully chosen chief of staff?

rahm-emanuel-raspberry

Is this a serious administration or what?

What.

Merely invoking a (paraphrase of a) small portion of 1Corinthians 13:11 solely as a rhetorical device, absent even a bare nod toward its substance, doesn’t bode well for this administration’s honesty or its seriousness, now does it?

But from his history, you were expecting anything else? “Sound and fury, signifying nothing” might be a better analysis of The One’s inauguration speech yesterday than any I’ve read/heard from the orifices of Mass Media Podpeople.

Trackposted to Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, Allie is Wired, Conservative Cat, Walls of the City, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Drive-by Compy Post

So, UPS came and went. 10 minutes later (took longer than absolutely needed to, cos I was being very careful… something I try to do consciously when I’m caffeine-deprived *heh*), new vidcard, new drivers good to go. Not as hairy as it could have been. Not too much command line stuff to do for new drivers, hence not as much chance for my usual typos. :-).

Quick rundown: I don’t “do” computer gaming, so although the onboard video was not satisfactory and I’d intended to replace it all along, I waited until a suitable vidcard turned up before doing so. Still, “suitable” for me would definitely not be suitabe for a hardcore gamer. But all I needed was quick response for normal video, still graphics and text. I had “pretty good” with the onboard video, just not “good enough” IMO, and besides, it took as much as 512MB of my system memory, sooo…

EVGA nVidia 9500GT with 1GB of DDR2. Now, if I’d been a gamer, I would almost have had to shell out another $100 beyond the ~$70 I paid for this one for a 9800GTX with 1GB of DDR3 and a faster GPU, but this card

1. frees up 512MB of (DDR2) system memory
2. with 2 DVI ports, offers an extra video out (over the analog video out the onboar video offered) in addition to the S-Video port it has, while the onboard video (with its analog and S-Video ports) is still available should I need it.

(I don’t expect I’ll be enabling the HDMI port on the motherboard any time soon, but it’s there as well)

Immediate impression? The DVI video does make a difference on my 22″ “widescreen” Acer V223W LCD. An easy “test” for me is the wee lil favicons I have lining a toolbar at the bottom of Opera: much clearer than earlier today with the analog input.

‘S’all, folks. Just a drive-by status report. Contrary to some of my experiences adding “unsupported” peripherals to Ubuntu, no hosing of system today.

L8R

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Inauguration Observations

What kinda “Ya gotta love me” fest is this thing today?

Early rehearsals for a special performance by The One and the Goofy One featured stand-ins who were:

a. too much “whiter” than The One and
b. a larger, more articulate version of Goofy Uncle Joe

Unfortunately, the stand-ins were so much better than The Stars (well, The Star and the Comic Sidekick) that the whole gig was canceled in favor of just the trademarked Big SmileTM from The One and the same old loopy dung beetle grin from The Goofy One.

Climbing near $160 million for the inauguration party/coronation? Gee, that’d just about cover my Twinky and Ho-Ho needs for the next 2,000 years… by which time I hope the Big Show will be over (well, it seems like it’s gone on nearly forever already, doesn’t it?).

I’ll leave other observations as an exercise for the reader. All one of you.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Allie is Wired, Walls of the City, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.