bits and bytes

A couple of weeks ago Ubuntu released their new version (10.04). This time I waited a bit to perform the upgrade of my laptop. The promosed very fast startups (sub 10 seconds). So yesterday night I upgraded. This morning booting took twice as long as before, some tools didn’t even work, my wifi didn’t want to connect anymore,…

I’ve been a ubuntu user since the very first  release. Pretty much every time they did an upgrade to the next version I ended up reinstalling everything. So like always I reinstalled my Ubuntu. But this time is really the last time, if with the next release I have to reinstall I’ll just switch to basic Debian. In the end it just has to work, right?

Maybe it’s also my mistake to add extra repositories to install tools that are not available in default Ubuntu. But I prefer that over installing straight from a .deb file.

Anybody else also having these issues? (I know a friend of mine had to reinstall as well, broken wifi)

Today I had to print +30 invoices. I had created 30 pdf’s but couldn’t find a way to print them all at once. In Windows you just drag them to the printer you want to print on (doesn’t matter what format) and Windows does the rest.

Does anybody know how you can do this in Gnome, this would be very handy at the end of every quartor

A couple off weeks ago my Dell Latitude E6500 arrived, it was installed with a Windows 7. Off course it was only a matter of hours before a fresh Linux kernel was doing the heavy lifting on that machine.

Before I used the Dell I was using an Acer. I was pretty satisfied but it was already an old machine. One thing I really liked about it was the multi touch scrolling, much like you have with Apple. For those who don’t know. If you are surfing and you have to scroll down. You just put both your fingers on the touchpad and drag them down. The page will scroll. On my Dell this didn’t work however, so I started investigating and after a while I found out that Dell uses a ALPS touchpad. Most other vendors use a synaptic touchpad. It seems the people from ALPS haven’t released any (good) documentation and therefor the Linux hackers can’t enable the multitouch.

This seems to be the first downside of my new Machine. For the rest pretty much everything worked out of the box. Wifi, Compiz, … Even my new usb headset with micro worked out of the box. Only real thing you have to add is the MP3 codecs.

This is pretty straight forward, but why not put in in a post anyway.

You go to the vmware site and download the latest vmware esxi build. Download it somewhere in your home drive. After downloading perform following tasks:

Become root (su - or sudo -s)

mount the iso file. I made a dir /media/isoimage to mount it to:


mkdir /media/isomage/
mount -o loop -t iso9660 ./VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.0.0-171294.x86_64.iso /media/isoimage/


I made a dir in my root folder to work in, copy the image.tgz file to there.


cd /media/isoimage/
mkdir /root/vmware-esxi-stuff
cp image.tgz /root/vmware-esxi-stuff/


Extract the image file

tar xzpfv image.tgz


Extract the actual file you need


bunzip2 VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd.bz2


Now connect your usbdisk to your linux computer, make sure you know how it gets connected. I always tail my log files to make sure.


tail -f /var/log/messages


When you connect your usbdisk you will see a lot of entries passing by. You will see something like


Aug 23 12:43:06 bjornmonnens-desktop kernel: [1134680.672567] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] 7818240 512-byte hardware sectors: (4.00 GB/3.72 GiB)


So now you know it is on sdc. Make sure there aren’t any partitions on there or delete everything using fdisk (this might not be necessary, but I did it anyway)


fdisk /dev/sdc
Command (m for help): p

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 5 900 917504 5 Extended
/dev/sdc4 * 1 4 4080 4 FAT16 <32M
/dev/sdc5 5 254 255984 6 FAT16
/dev/sdc6 255 504 255984 6 FAT16


Delete all and write to disk


Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-8): 1

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.


Ok now everything should be empty, so go ahead and write your dd image to the usbdisk using the following command.


dd if=VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd of=/dev/sdc


Ok it’s pretty easy, but it might help somebody. And for you windows guys us a bootable linux cd and perform these task instead of installing all kinds of rubbish on your computer.

A couple of weeks ago I complained about the font size in gnome. After some fooling around in my menu settings I found a small little tweak.

System -> Preferences -> Appearance

You’ll see a dialog with a couple of tabs. Choose the Fonts tab and click on the Details button. I changed my Resolution to 84 dots per inch. I’m using a dual 24″ TFT setup and looks much nicer. The fonts look more crispy and the whole desktop just feels nicer to play with.

On a side note for the hosting and colo side of our company we bought a new NAS. I asked the reseller to install an Openfiler on it. It is now fully configured and is already being used to backup all of our systems. I first had some trouble with the setup of the LDAP but now it works. So if you need a free nice NAS solution go ahead and check it out.

I’ve got a dedicated pc running some vmware images (trixbox,openbravo,oracle on linux,…) but after upgrading to ubuntu heron I couldn’t start my vmware console anymore. (Yes I know if I would be using Xen I didn’t have this issue.) But I like vmware better because you don’t have run a modified kernel. (maybe that info is outdated, not sure). In the end it just works. That is until the upgrade. I can’t start my vmware console to connect remote and my server is headless …

ssh -X to the rescue, you just gotta love linux

I upgraded a while ago to Ubuntu 8.04. I wasn’t really impressed, I didn’t see much difference with the previous version. Now after a while I’m actually getting pissed off with it :s I had configured my system just like I wanted it. apt-get installed most of the things I wanted. And now it seems many of the upgrades weren’t like I had expected. (prolly it’s my own fault, I’m also using non standard repo’s)

I also have a lot of firefox plugins installed (google calendar,del.icio.us,firebug,…) most of them can’t be upgraded to firefox 3. Also my zoneminder got broken so I have to recheck why that is happening (and yes, prolly I had better done this on a real server, but who hooks up a webcam to a server )

In the end I wished I had waited a bit longer until all applications got upgraded as well. Reminder to be more patient next time around.

I had built a small application using Postgresql as my database. I used the phpgpadmin to create my database schema (if I remember correctly). When I tried to issue SQL statement I always received errors that the tables didn’t exist, I figured out that if I used “TABLE”, then it worked.

Yesterday evening I had enough. I started googling why this was happening. After some time I found the answer and doing some testcases, it seems that this behaviour was pretty logical.

In short if you use Postgresql


create table TeSt(iD varchar(200));


Is not the same as

create table "TeSt"("iD" varchar(200));


If you do the first you can actually perform select id from test (or select Id from tEsT (reverse capitals). I get the feeling everything is converted to lowercase!

But if you issued the second statement the former selects won’t work. You really have to make it pinpoint accurate. So any people out there giving Postgresql a go. Take care how you generate your tables!!

The fix I did was pretty straightforward. Export my database to a sql file (using phppgadmin)(Also export data!). Then open with your favorite editor and replace all ” with nothing, save. Drop all your tables (but be sure you exported also the data ). After you schema is empty, perform the SQL and you should be up and running without the case sensitive stuff.

NOTE
I do agree that TeSt is not the same as test. I’m pro linux filesystem file conventions, but for sql it really is a pain in the ass when you use generator tools and they fuck up.

If your monitoring tool get’s out of control this is your lifesaver!!

mailq | tail +2 | awk ‘BEGIN { RS = “” }
# $7=sender, $8=recipient1, $9=recipient2
{ if ($7 == “monitoring@pczone.be” && $9 == “”)
print $1 }
‘ | tr -d ‘*!’ | postsuper -d -

Thanks pvanhoof for notifying me that my blog got hacked. I performed the XML-RPC upgrade. Bizar thing is that you couldn’t see it on my blog, you had to check the RSS feed to see it. So the planets got the SPAM, my apologies. I deleted the SPAM but I’m not sure if the planets will refetch the data and clear my posts. Some times writing your own software is better than using a well known product