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Picked up a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet yesterday which is a pretty cool piece of kit. Had quite a few of these running when working at Greencroft in the art department, and was impressed by them. With a new hush hush project being worked on (apart from those that have had sneak peeks…), it’s ideal, as is so much easier doing graphics work with a pen + tablet rather than a mouse.

Running off the desktop rather than the MacBook, as even with 2Ghz RAM, it doesn’t like manipulating 600-700Mb graphics files, so back to trusty Kubuntu and the GIMP (no jokes please!). Works like a charm, and sod the 2 CD’s of tablet drivers and associated software to allow it to work properly. Most modern kernels will have wacom support compiled as a module, so it works as a regular hotplug USB device straight out the box. Did add the following into the xorg.conf though (thanks to http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/wacom.html) to ensure it used the full size of the tablet and the eraser:

# Wacom graphics tablet
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "stylus"
Driver "wacom"
Option "Type" "stylus"
Option "Mode" "Absolute"
Option "USB" "on"
Option "Threshold" "10"
Option "Device" "/dev/wacom"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
[ ... ]
InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
[ ... ]

Definatley recommend a graphics tablet to others now I’ve spent a bit of time using one rather than simply seeing them in action elsewhere, and even when I’m skipping between apps or browsing the net, I’ll quite happily use the stylus. Helps combat the old RSI too I guess!

And no, you’ll have to wait to see what I’m working on

With Amarok throwing a wobbler and crashing once a day or so, and knowing that it’s only a couple of weeks until Dapper Drake makes it to final, is it worth waiting until 1st June or run an upgrade now and grab the shiny new Amarok 1.4 release?

I ran it when I first started playing with the 64-bit system and had Dapper, using Amarok 1.4-beta1 + beta2, and really liked some of the extra features such as *much* better media player support for my iPod Nano and Archos AV500, but since the rest of my system is so stable, I don’t want to risk upgrading just yet. Plus, I fired off some scripts a few weeks ago converting anything in .wma or .aac format to mp3 which means I’m not really needing Amarok 1.4 for updated taglib support for writing aac tags.

But, I’m a technology whore as someone recently describe me, and on cue, Amarok has just crashed

I downloaded Kubuntu 6.06 LTS over the weekend and it’s been sat in my backpack waiting to go onto the laptop. As I’m too used to being able to jump straight to a directory on various Linux boxes using fish:// or have WebDAV drives on-tap, I’d decided to stick Kubuntu onto my laptop for use at work. Having seen Dapper Drake running briefly on my desktop, it looked very slick.

But, it’s been a nightmare.

First off, I don’t agree with this idea of live CD’s and running an installer from inside it. The boot menu gives some nice options such as running a memory test and booting from the hard drive which previous versions didn’t, but why not then stick in an option to go straight to a normal install? Sure, you might want to give it a go to simply see how it runs, but performance will always be poor running from RAM + a CD, or for checking hardware compatibility, but I just want to be able to go straight to an install. Gentoo 2006.0 does the same thing, and failed to run through the installer a couple of weeks ago which annoyed me, though at least I could revert to a standard text-based install quite easily.

Anyways, aside from the annoyance of it loading up a live version of Kubuntu, the Espresso installer just didn’t work. Tabbing between menu items jumped all over, the actual order of the installer options didn’t seem very logical, and when the page for disk partitioning came up, the installer closed down. As it wouldn’t start again, I restarted the system. The installer wouldn’t run the second time round, so I just went to reboot back in to Gentoo.

“Grub error 22“. Bugger.

Quite impressively, the live CD managed to erase the hard drive. Not just corrupt the bootloader or partition table, but actually wipe the drive. Even Knoppix couldn’t repair it! Although I easily dropped a Windows image across the network back onto it (minus a dozen or so Windows updates since I don’t slipstream them with running a separate system for handling updates with the RM network), it wasn’t too bad as I don’t store any work on it, but it took out a Gentoo install which took a while to do. For those that have used Gentoo, you’ll know what this means!

To be fair, the Kubuntu website is now (under)stating “there is a bug in the live CD installer known to cause data loss, please wait for beta 2 before using it“, but that wasn’t there when I downloaded it, and it must be one hell of a bug! Again, to be fair, it is a beta, but the Kubuntu team are normally pretty solid and this is not at all what I was expecting. Annoyingly, whilst running the live version of Kubuntu, it did seem to have ACPI working properly to detect power usage, battery life and temperatures so it’s not all bad news.

I think I’ll use a 5.10 CD and simply change the sources.list to update to Dapper rather than try running another flight or TLS CD, and can only hope people haven’t lost any data trying to run this release in order to help out with testing + development of what will hopefully become a great release!

Well, it’s been a few days of playing around with my AMD Athlon64 3800+ X2, all of which has been under Ubuntu. I’ve found the whole thing pretty painless, with a lack of 64-bit specific apps not much of a problem as detailed earlier.

The dual-core kernel hasn’t spat it’s dummy out, although trying to run Dapper Drake 6.06 didn’t work out too well – ended up running around in serious dependency hell when it realised it had completely the wrong libraries. As it was just on a test hard drive, wasn’t bothered, but I did find it very, very slick before I balls-ed it up. KDE 3.5 was looking smart, the new version of Adept was looking good, simplying things even further for new users. Not convinced more experienced users will appreciate it as much, though it’s certainly looking like another cracking effort from the Ubuntu team to allow more new users to take on Linux.

The only problem I have been experiencing has been with Amarok. On my 32-bit system, I’d painlessly updated to Amarok 1.4-beta2, but it just won’t have any of it with the 64-bit libraries. That’s actually how I ended up giving Dapper Drake a go, which worked fine at the time before bailing out. It’s still got a few problems, even with all the media libraries and codecs installed, so will fire off a script tonight to convert any renaming .wma (evil, evil!) or .m4a files back to 192Kbps MP3 files so everything plays nice.

Even in it’s current case which has appalling airflow it’s running at 29C, moving up to 35C or so under load with a max lm-sensors has reported being 38C which is very nice. The Cool’n'Quiet technology really makes a massive difference – when I first turned it on, it really is barely noticable alongside the PSU fan, and only when the the load picks up and the fan rotates faster does the nice increase. Seems to nicely roll itself back down too, which I think is a credit to the ASRock system board since I know a couple of people running into problems with 64-bit systems because simply because of lack of support for Cool’n'Quiet.

No playing with Gregarius and Thunderbird tonight – I got my spiffy new AMD Athlon64 3800+ X2 processor, so that’s been the order of tonight’s play! Sitting on an ASRock system board, with 2GB PC3200 DDR RAM makes it a pretty decent system I suppose!

Since my main desktop is Ubuntu, thought I may as well stick with it, and the 64-bit version of Kubuntu has gone on very smoothly indeed. Picked up the on-board network without a problem, and worked fine with the Audigy2 sound card. The ATI drivers have installed quickly once the system was up and running, as did ndiswrapper for my wireless card.

Running Firefox in 32-bit mode isn’t a big problem and performance probably won’t really be noticeable anyways, and the same method of wrapping it within a script for 32-bit compatibility works for Thunderbird. Both of these have been upgraded to 1.5 – details for upgrading Firefox and Thunderbird for those running older versions.

I’m also running the amd64-k8-smp kernel to take advantage of the dual-core processor which wasn’t installed by default (just the generic amd64 kernel), and that’s worked without any major problems that other people seem to have ran into such as incorrect time-keeping, bizarre behaviour under X11 and driver incompatibility. The only thing I’ve so been unable to get running is Amarok 1.4-beta2 which I had working before, though I suspect the dependency problems I’m running into may be caused by running the 64-bit binaries. Will do some digging tomorrow.

Too early to really tell how well the system is performing, as it hasn’t even come close to being pushed, but is definately a lot, lot faster than my previous XP2800+. Installing new packages and compiling from source is frighteningly fast though I did have a chuckle the first time the system loaded and an error message was thrown from the sound server – “CPU overload”

A few people have had a snigger or two at my expense on this one, except none of them buggers could offer any useful suggestions. I’ve tried to install Apache on my Ubuntu install, something I’ve done dozens of times on other systems, including a number of servers in the workplace handling thousands of requests a day. I reckon I know a thing or two about Linux having used it for about 6/7 years as well, but this had me stumped.

I was unable to access Apache from my local machine, but other networked machines could. A quick check revealed I was actually unable to ping any of internal devices – loopback, ethernet or wireless from my machine, but other machines could. Figuring it was a simple firewall error, checked my iptables and all fine. Have spent a good few hours flushing rules, adding new ones, reconfiguring devices, etc. Even tried installing firestarted, guardog and shorewall.

It actually looks like quite a common problem with Ubuntu, certainly with 5.10. And the fix?

sudo ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1

I mean, come on, it was purely by chance I tried this one! Everything else on the network has been fine including routing and filtering across my wireless link for the rest of the machines on my network, but Ubuntu doesn’t bring up lo properly which causes local services to fail? Not impressed

Upgrading to Thunderbird 1.5 yesterday stopped all my RSS feeds from working – I knew I’d come a cross something Kinda figured something wasn’t quite right yesterday, but then with no feeds updating this morning it definately meant a problem. Simply selecting each feed from ‘Manage Subscriptions’ and re-subscribing to each one brought them back to life, but still a little odd.

I’ve spent most of today moving my desktop machine onto a new hard drive, which gave me an opportunity to start from scratch. I’d become a little frustrated over the last few weeks with niggly little things diverting my attention, when what I really want is to simply turn the desktop on and have it functioning quickly + easily. So, I’ve actually moved away from Debian (a little…) and installed Ubuntu.

As I’ve blogged in the past, although Debian has served me well for 3/4 years now and has been exclusively running my desktop for a year or so, my laptop moved to Gentoo back in November, and although Debian is still my prefered choice for a server OS, after running quite a few Ubuntu installs for others I’ve been drawn to it for my own use. For those running Linux as their sole OS or at least for a large part of the time, you’ll know you usually spend the first year or so with Linux moving between distros trying things out and tweaking your system, but then stick to one that works and have little reason to change. But, as Ubuntu is so closely related to Debian, it’s not such a big adjustment.

One thing that has drawn me to Ubuntu is their support, especially their forums and wiki, matched only by Gentoo in my opinion. More up to date packages are a plus point, which although is easily done with Debian by changing your branch to testing, the support base is their with Ubuntu to guide you. Things such as upgrading to Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5 (two apps I use more than anything else) took about 5 minutes including restoring extensions, themes, mail and personal settings – all easily documented in their wiki.

A couple of new things are pretty cool, the first being Amarok. I previously used Kaffeine, but have grabbed the 1.4 beta version which provides WMA support within libtag to allow scanning of collections containing WMA files, amongst other things. This also ties in with last.fm, so I’ve now got an account on there detailing what crap I’m listening to, though not quite sure how I’ll be utilising it.

I’ve also used Superkaramba rather than gDesklets, and done away with gKrellM at least for the time being. Fluxbox is also being put to one side for the moment. To be honest, I haven’t actually had any performance problems – in fact it seems nippier than the Debian system. I think is partly due to Firefox + Thunderbird 1.5 releases, and having stripped out quite a bit from Ubuntu such as Bluetooth, HP printing, CUPS, ACPI, etc.

Overall, very happy so far! The only slight problem has been various audio + video codecs, easily solved by following through the restricted media formats wiki entry and lack of WMA support from the base Amarok install which is also easily resolved. Am sure I’ll find something to complain about tomorrow though

Since I’m a good guy at heart, I set up a couple of old Compaq Deskpro EN’s for Belmont Parish Hall that had been donated by Phillips during their factory closure. The machines weren’t bad – PIII 1Ghz, 128Mb RAM, 20Gb hard drive with the usual on-board graphics, network + audio. Quite impressive little machines. I called them Bill + Ben.

Anyways, without the money (or rather the need) to pay for Windows licences, Office licences, etc. and without me wanting to constantly patch them and remove viruses + spyware, Linux was called for. Having toyed with Ubuntu and Edubuntu with a possible move of some school workstations to Linux, I decided to give Kubuntu a whirl for these computers. The reason for my switch away from Debian + Gentoo is quite simple – the computers needed to be as simple to use as possible, and resemble the look + feel of Windows.

Debian is a little too slow on the uptake with updates to KDE, and I didn’t fancy running them from testing without me taking control of them. Ubuntu runs Gnome by default which is a little too different out-of-the-box for a user coming from Windows. Edubuntu is too much for kids. Knowing the Debian base would hold steady and apt would make it easy to update stuff at the click of a button, Kubuntu rolled out painfully easily. Everything was picked up during install, only requiring Firefox + Thunderbird to be installed once the install was finished. A quick tweaking of KDE to remove the desktop pager, wastebin + KNote from the system try, and dropping desktop icons for OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc + Impress (turning off Java + setting MS Office default file formats) along with simple shortcuts to E-mail, Internet, My Documents, Floppy, CD-ROM, etc. meant sitting my mother down at the screen resulted in a smile on her face rather than puzzlement.

Actually, my mother is no slouch with computers now, but as with most people, doesn’t like change. For her to be comfortable using it hopefully means the other users at the hall will be too. I have another one to do tomorrow which will be the main office one, and looking at bringing another two older machines out of the garage to setup in the same manner giving them 4 machines for open access at the hall. With each of the machines setup to automatically download updates, along with a restore image created with partimage, shouldn’t be much that can go wrong.

Here’s hoping so!