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Recovering != Reinstalling

A client of mine his Linux box crashed. I followed the manual that came with the server and the OS that was given with the server (Suse Linux). As I followed the guide the suggested to use ReiserFS (I’m more in favor of ext3) and also to use LVM what I really like 🙂

So the box crashed and I had to reinstall, after discussing with the client we had chosen Ubuntu as distro. I had used an Edgy cd to do a live boot and to make sure their data was still okay. (You have to boot live, then apt install lvm2, modprobe dm-mod,vgscan,vgchange and mount your stuff). This worked perfect in Edgy. So I thought let’s reinstall using Edgy, hmm very strange seems you can’t do that. Parted doesn’t see your LVM. After downloading Ubuntu 7.10 and reinstalling LVM in live mode, still no go. Finally after doing the vgscan and vgchange Parted could finally see the LVM partitions and I could start the reinstall. (Maybe I forgot one off the 2 last steps in Edgy, so it could be possible, but if I remember correctly I did try this but wasn’t successfull.)

Does anybody know of distro’s who come with LVM support out of the box? As I installed Suse like this, Suse should have this. Can’t remember if my Fedora had this option.

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Hauppauge 500

My mythtv box died, or better said, it can’t detect my hauppage card anymore :(. I moved it to a new PCI slot but lspci didn’t show anything. My best bet it’s dead.

I’ve been looking around for a hauppage 500 card (the one with the dual tunner). But it seems nobody sells them anymore? Does somebody know a dealer who still sells them, or does hauppauge have a new version out with dual tuner?
I saw they now have some digital cards as well. Maybe interesting to use this in combination with TV vlaanderen ?? Anybody got experience with this ?

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KDE 4 dolphin

As most of you know, KDE 4 got released. Jos Henri pointed to a website helping out installing it on ubuntu. I gave it a go, the screenshots of it looked pretty cool.

The file-explorer reminded me of the finder in Mac and it works the same way. I started it up and it works in my gnome environment, probably I’ll start using this instead of krusader and nautilus. Or at least try it for a while to get a better opinion about it. I really didn’t get why nobody wrote the columns view in nautilus. Maybe in the next version?

I’m also planning on installing the full KDE4 environment on my laptop to see it working with full bling bling 🙂

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Asterisk problems

A couple of months ago I upgraded my trixbox to 2.2. I now had the problem that when I called out or someone called in, as soon as the other party answered the call was disconnected. While tracing asterisk with the -gccc option I didn’t find any trace of errors. Today I finally got 10 minutes to spare and got reminded that this feature wasn’t working.

After tracing with -gcc and also the asterisk system log file I got this error message :


Unable to find a codec translation path from g729 to ulaw

After googling it , I was reminded that g729 was actually not installed by default and that you needed to purchase it. So in my config I removed that codecs from my allowed entries. After testing it a couple of times it now seems to work again. So back to happy asterisking 🙂

Reason why I got reminded was that a friend asked what this new Oracle product was, he said it was something like Asterisk. So after checking it out, it seems to be more like a full Communication Server (like the Windows product). But then again, there is probably also an Asterisk version where you can have video conferencing,… (the integration with SugarCRM is already available …)

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32bits with 8 gig RAM

I was installing a new server with 8 gig RAM. (I’ll be using it as a vm box) After installation I did free and noticed that only 3.3 gig of physical RAM was found, hmm very strange. After talking to Bert he gave me a nice command I never heared off (dmidecode) . This gives you all kinds of hardware information. I was always using cat /proc/meminfo and free for my memory.

dmidecode displayed 2 x 2 gig. Hmm even odd, checked the invoice but it said 2 x 4 gig. They told me that it could be because I installed a 32 bit Linux. But I remembered reading in the Kernel book that Linux 32 bit could handle more. They had built something called HIGHMEM. But it seems that either the PAE or the HIGHMEM feature aren’t enabled by default. So after a reinstalling my box with a 64 bit Linux everything works fine.

Learned something again : if your box has more than 4 gig of memory, just choose 64 bit otherwise it’ll probably be wasted.

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Fedora 8

I just upgraded my Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. I didn’t notice to much difference. Okay the login screen looks much better 🙂

However I did install Compiz-fusion. This is really amazing, MS and Apple still have a lot of catching up todo if you look at this. I followed the tutorial on the Howto site but I still have to run Compizmanager as a separate process. I really like the new features (flatten your desktop, group applications on a virtual plane,…)

My girlfriend is doing here internship at some schools. She demoed Ubuntu and Beryl. The day after she had to bring Ubuntu cd’s for all the kids in here class. My little saleswoman is doing great, don’t you agree?

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Dojo 1.0 + OCR

This week Dojo 1.0 was released. I already took a quick look at it, and it looks really nice. Big changes since the last version I used (0.4). The new grid is awesome, I really hope it will be easy to use but I’m pretty sure it will be. The guys from the Dojo community are really good programmers. I spent some timing digging through the code for a fix, I saw several things I didn’t even know were possible with Javascript 🙂
I’ll come back on Dojo once I’ve got some real first hand experience with it, but it looks promising (and also much faster than previous releases)
I already found out that if you pass in a JSON store to your grid, your identifier better be unique or it won’t work (took me some time to figure that one out 🙂 )

A couple of weeks ago We bought a All in one (scanner,fax,printer,copier). The nice thing about this device it let’s you scan 50 pages (document feeder) without having to put every page on the scanner window. That combined with the ability to scan to a networkdrive,email or ftp server makes this device the perfect solution for my administrative problem. My goal is to go to a paperless office but it will take some time until we get there.
Problem is the device scans the images straight to PDF. So text actually becomes an image, you can’t select it, search for text,… it’s not yet what I want. In my Ubuntu I searched for OCR and got some results witch I installed. Almost all of the tools let me scan for text in the PDF, when I saved the document I suddenly could search for text in the document. Still the selecting of text wasn’t possible. Philip told me that Google had a solution that let’s you convert these kind of documents to XHtml. I knew they were developing an OCR tool but didn’t know it would be able to do this kind of stuff. I tried to install it but I’m still missing some dependecies, I’ll try it later again.

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Am I a trader ?

I’m an IT geek with a real affection for FLOSS, but I’m not anti not-FLOSS (hmmm, weird sentence 🙂 ). I also use Microsoft on a daily base, Mac on a weekly base because my customers use it. At my company nearly all software is opensource, +90% of our operating systems are Linux.
I always try to push my customers to FLOSS software but in the end they decide what happens. I understand that some people see it black and white, but in my daily business live I’ve seen a lot of cases where opensource isn’t the best choice (yet). I would love to bring a product up to speed with the closed source competitors, but most of my customers don’t want to wait on that, so they choose a closed source product. We as IT people see that this is a bad choice in the ultimate end, but in the near future they need a solution and then the closed source is a better option.

So am I a trader? Hmm in my eyes not, but then again in some people there eyes I maybe am. Like the saying goes:
The truth is in the eye of the beholder 🙂

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Ubuntu gutsy + Google Calendar

This weekend I upgraded my main desktop from Feisty to Gutsy. It went pretty smooth I have to admit. Just click upgrade and it works as it supposed. I had installed the Ubuntu Studio theme and that got upgraded too. When my X came back up I was really amazed, I had to remember to close my jaw.
I really like the gray theme I have now. It’s much more clearer than the former one. (I could have switched to another one, but didn’t want too 🙂 )

I also noticed they ditched Gaim and switched to Pidgin. I was using it already on my F7 and works perfect with my 2 hotmail,1 google and 1 jabber account 😛

Another thing I really like is that nautilus now has the Documents,Photos,… folders in the main opendialog-form.

I have to conclude it feels like another successful iteration of the Gnome desktop and Ubuntu distro!

On planet gnome I saw this article. In the feature list it states

• Viewing default calendar
• Creating/modifying/deleting the appointments

Hubba hubba, /me wants this for his desktop. I use Google Calendar all the time. My girlfriend even uses it. I still have to find a better Calendar web application! I even get notified by SMS.
At the moment I just import it as a read only calendar, so getting the other CUD features is … … SWEET

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Linux phone / pda

Does anybody know a Linux based phone that you can actually use to phone,sms and that has a wifi connection? (current openmoko can’t sms yet AFAIK)

The guys over at openmoko are almost there, but they don’t have the wifi support in there current product. The next release should include the wifi connection. I was just wondering if anybody knows such a phone please do let me know?