One Fish. Two Fish.

I made a posting on the Ubuntu Forums concerning my issue with Bluefish not starting and got the suggestion of running it from the command line.

It ran perfectly.

So, I looked at the command line associated with the icon in the menu.

bluefish -n -p %f

I deleted that non-functioning icon from the "Other" menu and found an inactive icon in the "Programming" menu, perhaps left over from a previous installation. The command line for that was:

bluefish %f

That icon worked so my problem all along was something to do with the command qualifiers. And, of course, the question of why it was working before and then stopped working, even after deleting the personal settings directory (~/.bluefish).

It works. I'm happy.

The blues

It began with me wanting to do some website editing with Bluefish on my Ubuntu laptop. It would clock but then would not actually start. I rebooted, restored Bluefish, and rebooted again all to the same result. I did a complete uninstall and noticed that my Bonager application was informing me that a file system check was due to be done on the next boot so I booted again.

* Checking root file system...
fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
os_part contains a file system with errors, check forced.
os_part: |==================================================| 100%

(there may have been more here but it rolled off the screen)

os_part Inode 131111300 has illegal blocks(s)

os_part: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
(i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck died with exit status 4

*An automatic file system check (fsck) of the root filesystem failed
A manual fsck must be performed, then the system restarted.
The fsck should be performed in maintenance mode with the
root filesystem mounted in read-only mode.
*The root filesystem is currently mounted in read-only mode.
A maintenance shell will now be started.
After performing system maintenance, press CONTROL-D
to terminate the maintenance shell and restart the system.
bash: no job control in this shell
bash: groups: command not found
bash lesspipe: command not found
bash: command: command not found
bash: The: command not found
bash: dircolors: command not found
bash: command: command not found
bash: The: command not found
root@dell:~#

I entered

root@dell:~# fsck /dev/sda6

fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
e2fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul 2007)
os_part contains a file system with errors, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes

this ran for 10 minutes

Inode 131111300 has illegal blocks(s). Clear? yes

Illegal block #12 (247843560) in inode 131111300. CLEARED.

there were then 10 additional illegal blocks cleared

Too many illegal blocks in Inode 131111300.
Clear inode? yes

Restarting e2fsck from the beginning...
os_part contains a file system with errors, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes

after 15 minutes it got to

Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information

It threw some sort of error with a gazillion blocks and asked if I wanted to fix them

Free blocks count wrong for group #12804 (2, counted=1198).
Fix? yes

There were scores of these questions. I just held down the "Y" key for 40 seconds.

os_part: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
os_part: ***** REBOOT LINUX *****
os_part: 143595/14195712 files (5.9% non-contiguous), 20304605/113563452 blocks
root@dell:~#

A ctrl-d rebooted and the mess was apparently cleared up. OK, so where was I? Oh, yes. Bluefish. I tried re-installing aaaaaand. . . . it still won't run.

Chatty

Last week, I had left my machine on overnight and my chat program (Pidgin) running and got up to find a message waiting for me. This was different from the typical spam messages one is likely to receive in that the person actually had a real online profile. Actually, there were two profiles, one indicating that she was a single 30 year old fashion designer in London and the other that she may have been living in Virginia Beach. My own profile was three years out of date so I didn't find anything to suggest any deception.

I responded to the message that I was going to work and would be back 12 hours later.

She responded "i will like to talk with u" 45 minutes later when I was again away from my machine.

The next day we again missed each other.

On the third day I made a point of not going to bed early on the chance that she would be on after 10 as she had been the first time she tried to talk to me.

sara: Hello hey
sara: are u there
geis: Indeed, I am.
sara: Nice to meet u
geis: And good to have a sentient on the other end. Most of the messages I receive are from spam bots.
geis: So, what brought you to be knocking on my virtual door?

And that was it. She didn't respond after that. Was she really a bot that I confused with my response. Was she a human confused by my response. My sentence structure when I write is sometimes archaic, having been influenced by my early reading of Verne and Wells, but it's certainly more clear that the online Newspeak of "r u ther." I know I can be frightening at times (I scared one of my daughter's friends just by saying "Hi, how ya' doin'") but surely I'm not that scary.

It was quite odd.

Regionalism

A friend of mine brought a "Tales from Earthsea" DVD back from Japan. The problem is the Region 2 DVD will not run on US players. I popped it in my Ubuntu Laptop and it started right up. The problem I have is that it defaults to playing DVDs with Totem Movie Player and Totem starts playing the movie right away and doesn't allow me to access the menu so I can read the subtitles. I prefer to use Ogle. (I haven't changed my default settings yet to have it start Ogle automatically.)

So, I can watch the movie. Not as good as I would have hoped, apparently director Gorō Miyazaki did not inherit his father Hayao's directorial skills. (I may review it here in more detail later.)

Even so, I wanted to have a copy of it since I don't have any idea when it may be released in the US. (Not for two years at least.) It wouldn't work with the standard copy program because the 7+gig image would not fit on a 4.7gig DVD-R. I installed k9copy and it appeared to copy the disk completely but it will not run at all on Ogle. It will start up with Totem but, again, I can't access the menu to adjust the subtitles.

More work to be done.

Wipeout

I've been trying to upload Google Earth .kmz files up into Google Maps but it kept giving me an error. The Google Earth Community website revealed that the upload from file feature had been broken for some time. The option was to upload from a URL. To do this I would need to load the file up to my domain with FTP.

I hadn't loaded an FTP client onto my Ubuntu Laptop yet so I shopped around and decided to try FireFTP, an FTP client for Firefox. Afterwards, though, my NoScript extension failed. And then, I would have to attempt to start Firefox two or three times to get it to finally launch. I tried disabling the extensions and reinstalling them all to the same result.

I went into the Synaptic Package Manager, uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox. I did a complete removal and reinstallation of Firefox. Same result.

The Ubuntu Forums had the following command line uninstall:

sudo apt-get remove --purge firefox
mv -v ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla-backup
sudo apt-get remove --purge firefox* mozilla-firefox*
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox

That did it. I added the FireFTP extension first and everything was fine, so it wasn't it's fault inherently. I reloaded all my other extensions but when I reloaded NoScript it crashed again.

I tried again, figuring that FireFTP and NoScript were incompatable. I uninstalled and re-installed everything again except FireFTP. But then NoScript crashed again when I reinstalled GreaseMonkey, and that fragged Firefox.

I don't think it's FireFTP or GreaseMonkey that are to blame, it's an instability in NoScript.

One more uninstall and reinstall. This time, I installed NoScript first. Then GreaseMonkey. That went well so I thought I'd try to expand things by installing FireFTP. This was looking good. Then ForcastFox. Then ColorZilla. Then AdBlock.

Crash.

I was back to figuring that it was NoScript and FireFTP. I tried it all one more time. NoScript. AdBlock. GreaseMonkey. ColorZilla. ForcastFox.

Crash.

Once more, without NoScript at all.

Success.

I like the security provided by NoScript a lot but it's clearly shown itself to not play well with others.

Bad Sectors

On of my Windows drives may be dying at an accelerating rate. Last week I had some issues with it not responding properly and my loosing some files. I performed a scandisk and re-installed the mapping software I had on the drive but I'm having problems yet again. Another scandisk lost several more bad sectors.

Yet another reason to migrate to Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the mapping software that runs on Windows, National Geographic Topo, does not run under Crossover on Linux.

Ubuntu Ascending

I've solved the issues I had several weeks ago with my iPod and USB drive and appreciate Ubuntu for it. Having had difficulties getting both Win98 and Ubuntu to recognize these devices I pulled up Ubuntu's system log. Helpfully, the log suggested an issue with the USB cable. I worked out with my desktop machine that the issue was with the unit's USB port. Using a different port solved those problems.

I had a similar problem with getting my iPod to also be seen by my laptop. Using a different USB port also solved that issue. For some reason the iPod prefers to use the upper port rather than the lower one, even though the port itself is fine and other devices work on that port without issue.

I've installed Crossover from Codeweavers.com, an application that uses Wine to run Windows applications on Linux. The application I want most to run, National Geographic TOPO, doesn't work, unfortunately. Autostitch works. GSAK fails when you first start it but then works.

I have had an ongoing issue with connecting to the wireless AP at Carnegie Library in Squirrel Hill. A week or so ago, I was at the library in Carnegie and was able to connect without issue. Today, I am now able to connect at the Squirrel Hill library (I'm posting from there now) so I imagine that my update to Gutsy Gibbon had something to do with that.

Ubuntu Miscellanea

I wanted to upload some more music to my iPod but the gtkpod application wouldn't see my iPod from my laptop where the particular MP3s were. (The CD-R of music I had would not play or rip to MP3 on my desktop but would on my laptop.) Ubuntu would mount the iPod as a volume but the application couldn't see it. When I went to my desktop machine I found that it wouldn't recognize the USB drive that I store all my MP3s on. The Win98 drive plugged into the desktop will see the USB drive without issue but Ubuntu won't anymore. I wonder what might have changed since the last time.

I updated my OS from Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on both machines without any issues whatsoever. That didn't resolve my iPod and USB drive issues, however.

I had some issues with my laptop loosing network connectivity. I still had full bars on the wireless AP but just didn't have the connection. Looking in the system log I saw the system repeatedly trying to get an IP address and failing. I reconnected to the AP, inserted the WEP key and got a good connection that seemed to hold. I suspect that it had to do with the fact that we have two wireless routers. In any case, that issue is resolved.

I uploaded some flickr pictures and discovered that when I use the Gimp graphic editor in Ubuntu, the EXIF data (camera, focal length, shutter speed, date and time, etc) is retained to be uploaded to flickr automatically, whereas when I use the Paint Shop Pro software on my Win98 machine, that information is stripped. Yet another reason for me to migrate to Ubuntu.

That is, if I can solve my iPod and USB drive issues.

Wireless Woes

Several times last week I tried to connect to Pittsburgh's free wifi without success. Thinking perhaps it was related to the particular access points I was attempting to connect through (unlikely, but I was running out of good explanations) I pulled my laptop out on the other side of town. Not only could I not get the gateway window to signon, I couldn't even see the wireless AP at all. Kind of sad, I thought, since I could see the antennas on top of the light pole.
I tried again today and couldn't see the half dozen access points that I had seen last week. I began to think something was tragically wrong with my wireless card.

When I got home, I immediately turned on the machine and could not find the AP in my house. I feared my wireless card had gone bad. Thus began the search for answers. I pulled up the System Log and a keyword search found a strange error:

Kill switch must be turned off for wireless networking to work.

Very clearly my cause. Now how to figure out what the Hell a kill switch was and how I had gotten it turned on. I'm pleased to say that it didn't take too long for me to find that the Dell laptop has a wireless antenna symbol on the F2 key. At some point I must have hit the function and this key to kill the wireless. Literally. Fn+F2 turned it back on.

So, what's the kill switch really for? It strikes me as a security feature. If something starts hacking your machine wirelessly, Fn+F2 disabled the wireless and kills the connection. Like yanking the Cat-5 cable out of the port.

Whew.

Google Earth sucks

I built a number of maps of the Great Allegheny Passage using the "My Maps" feature of Google Maps. The problem is that there were so many waypoints and paths that they didn't show them all on one page. And uploading them to Google Earth only seems to transfer the first page of waypoints. So, I deleted the waypoints from Google Maps and loaded it again into Google Earth so that I could add those waypoints.

Now, I thought it was good because then I could see all of the waypoints at once. I used "save" and "save as" and used both .KML and .KMZ file formats. But, after closing then re-opening the application most of the tracks were simply gone.

I had meticulously clicked out 150 miles of paths on Google Maps only to have them simply disappear.

Oh, and when you use "cut", you can't use "paste." They should have just called it "delete."

And you can't move waypoints from one location to another, for example to change the order so that the flyover makes sense. Or even to group things together, say to put all the tracks in one folder and all the other waypoints in another.

A whole lot of work simply flushed down the toilet.

Day One

My new Dell-Ubuntu laptop arrived yesterday afternoon (I called off work so I could be home to sign for it). I've been playing with it and am generally pleased. Here are a few things I've learned in the last 24 hours.

I hadn't realized that it had an SD card slot. I can just pull the card out of my camera and plug it in. It even prompts that it discovered a photo card and asks if I want to download everything.
I had expected that the DVD player wouldn't work right out of the box. I've installed Ogle and Gxine and will be experimenting with various formats, controls and such. Part of the plan is to have the laptop play videos for the Confluence video program. Several things I want to show I have only been able to find as AVI files.

The touchpad is nice enough but I want a mouse. I have a little travel mouse but it's too small. I want to get a more standard size unit.

The batery charging light doesn't come on when the battery is charging. Not a big deal. I just added the Power Manager icon in the system tray. The history feature is pretty neat.

I've had some strangeness with the wireless connection. Yesterday it connected to the access point upstairs without any problem. Today, it wouldn't. Instead, it wanted to connect to the one downstairs. In either case, I need to program it as a specific selection otherwise it's going to ask me for the WEP key every time I connect.

I also received a strange message when I was setting it up about a default keyring password. I gave it a password but now every time I connect at home I'm prompted to enter that password.
I'm not sure what's that's all about yet.

During lunch, I attempted to connect to Pittsburgh's free wi-fi. I could see the access point but what was supposed to happen, the signon page coming up, didn't. I select a nearby hotel access point and got their login page so it's not something inherently wrong with my wireless, Ubuntu or Firefox. But it would not surprise me if the hosts built their page with IE in mind and it just wasn't clicking with my machine. I'll have to look into that further, as well.

My PC still has that Windows button between the Fn and Alt keys. It doesn't do anything (of course). I have to look into how I can remove the logo.

I found that system76 has free Ubuntu stickers. All you have to do is send then a self-addressed stamped envelope. I sent them one so that I can get the sticker on my machine. Dell should put them on just like they pimp the "Designed for Windows" logos.

Music of Erich Zann

I have finally figured out the problem with getting my iPod to be recognized by Ubuntu.

Power.

My USB hub was working well enough for Ubuntu version 6 to recognize and mount my iPod but something mysterious happened when I upgraded and the PC could not longer supply enough power to the hub for it to recognize the iPod. It was enough for every other USB device but not for the iPod. Plugging in the external power supply to the hub got it to be recognized. I deleted a few file entries that I had previously made in an attempt to solve the problem and it all came back.

Now, I can again immerse myself in the evil that is the iPod.

One step forward. . .

The past two weeks have been filled with Ubuntu pain and joy. First, the pain. . .

After trying to update my laptop to try to get my wireless network card to work, I began having issues with the system freezing. It would go through the startup and then end with a blank screen and a non-flashing cursor right before the login prompt should have come up. Multiple reboots would get the system to finally come up. Shutting down, however, would hang and the Ubuntu splash screen and not shut down. It was a vicious cycle.

The first suggestion I attempted was an upgrade from 6.06 to 7.04. That didn't work. I tried going back to the original 6.06 version but the hanging issue got worse. I thought perhaps it was an old BIOS and download an update but it would only work with Windows. I couldn't get my 98 disks to install (not bootable) so I installed 95. That wouldn't run the BIOS upgrade and I couldn't get it to upgrade to 98. I don't have any 2000 disks so I tried an FDISK /MBR to really clear out everything on the disk and try Ubuntu again. The boot problem was worse than ever. Not only would it not boot, even after multiple attempts, it took multiple attempts to book from the live CD.

So, something in the laptop is truly screwed up. I've read some things about Ubuntu messing with an EPROM on old IBM laptops like mine but couldn't find enough to tell me how to fix it. I've thought of buying a new drive to make sure there's nothing there.

One step forward. Two steps back.

Then, Dell announced that by the end of the month they would be offering a number of their models with Ubuntu pre-installed. I'm not quite ready to give up on my IBM T20 yet, but if I can get a new machine with Ubuntu all ready to go, maybe it will be worth the investment.

Dude, I'm gettin' a Dell.

On the plus side, in the meantime I've also been working with my swappable drive on my tower. I yank the Win98 drive and slide in the Ubuntu drive. I've upgraded to 7.04. Partitioned the drive better. Tweaked it so that I get full 1440x900 resolution on my flat panel display. Installed Google Earth (still runs pretty slow, though). Added wallpapers. Migrated my Buddy List from Trillian into GAIM. Installed Thunderbird (but haven't migrated my accounts yet). Migrated my Firefox bookmarks. And I am now writing this blog from that Ubuntu machine.

The next real step is to get a Windows emulator running so that I can run several apps that I really want to have that are designed for the Windows environment (such as National Geographic Topo). I also need to tweak some things to get all the buttons on my Logitech MX510 mouse to work.

Two steps foreward. . .

In troubleshooting my issue with getting wireless connectivity on my Ubuntu laptop last week, I signed onto the WPLUG (Western PA Linux Users Group) IRC channel. I worked with someone there for quite some time with no success. The suggestion was made to upgrade from v6.06 to the due to come out any minute v7.04.

Before going to Erie for the weekend I had time to download the install disk but then realized that the disk is only for a clean install. I didn't have the time to upgrade through the web and left it for when I came back.

Yesterday, I completed the upgrade and suddenly lost my 1024x768 screen. I was stuck with 640x480. Ugh! I sifted through the forum archives, found some troubleshooting efforts but was unable to get it to work right. Since I didn't really have anything installed, I decided to wipe the whole thing out and start from scratch with a clean install.

That seemed to go normally. It didn't solve my wireless issue, however. And then, the laptop would not shut down. It would go through the unload bar and hang at a splash screen. I could manually power off but then the next reboot would hang after the splash at a blank screen. I would reboot again to the same result. The next reboot might come up normally or it may take a few more attempts.

The last lines of the system log before each restart is:
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth1: link is not ready
message handler not found under /com/redhat/dhcp/eth0 for sub-path eth0.dbus.get.reason

eth1 refers to the network card so I popped the network card and shutdown. It hung at the splash screen shutting down. It froze again booting up but the next reboot worked. The log had that message handler error again but not the link not ready message.

. . . one step back.

CheerPod

Last year, I purchased an iPod and had a nightmare installing it, probably because I was using Windows 98. I've been trying to learn Linux and am very pleased to find out that if I plug my iPod in, Ubuntu recognizes it just like any other USB drive. A piece of cake.

Of course, that doesn't allow me to manage the music on the drive. For that, I found the appropriate posting at Ubuntu Forums, enabled universal packages in Synaptic and installed gtkpod.

It took a matter of minutes. That is, once I knew what I was doing. I spent quite a bit of time before that reading up on just what was what and seeking out the clearest instructions.

I'm liking this Ubuntu/Linux thing.

Connectile Disfunction

This problem has been a long time developing, beginning with the slow internet connectivity problem that we blamed on Comcast but that turned out to be a bad router. To resolve that issue, we got a new combo router/wireless-AP. We got that up and the router part worked fine. We didn't test the wireless part because we had another wireless access point upstairs that worked just fine.

We have people over on a regular basis and last week when they showed up and tried to access our new wireless connection downstairs they couldn't. This began hours upon hours of troubleshooting. Ultimately, we ended up back where we started. The router was working but not as a wireless access point.

As a result of all the monkeying about, however, my laptop would not longer connect. It could get five bars of signal on the AP but would not get the network. On a reboot, I started getting a "New Hardware" prompt for a PCI Controller that drivers could not be found for. At one point I removed the device from the device manager and was able to get the network to work but the next reboot landed me back where I started again. But this time, deleting the device wouldn't do what it did before.

The final, fatal mistake was to attempt to re-install the wireless card. You see, several years ago, I got a wireless card for my daughter's laptop. I couldn't get it to work on her machine properly so I thought I'd give her the card I had and install that one on my laptop. I don't even remember all the details but there was some driver or something left over on my machine that I couldn't get rid of that prevented installing the card. Eventually I resolved it but I had forgotten about that all last night when I tried re-installing the card and the missing dll files reared their ugly heads.

I had enough. I pulled a few files off the machine onto a USB flash, wiped the hard drive and installed the Ubuntu-flavor of Linux.

Except, that I couldn't get the wireless card to work. It could get five bars of signal on the AP but would not get the network.

Today, in a search of the Internet, I found some documentation that was neither in the operating system's Help nor in the big ass book "Ubuntu Unleashed" that I purchased to learn this stuff:

"Step 5a. If your access point requires a WEP key, it must be entered with a dash after every fourth character, ie (xxxx-xxxx-xx)"

So, with the perceived answer in hand, I finally got home to try it out. . . and the laptop will not boot. It gets through much of the boot and then simply stops with a flashing cursor.

What the fsck.

As I've been writing this I was able to get it to boot from the disk. It looks like I'll be installing it again.

An apolgy to Comcast

After the absolutely awful speeds of this morning, it was decided we had had enough. But before complaining to Comcast, I recommended connecting a PC straight into the cable modem because I knew that whatever tech drone we got a hold of at Comcast was going to say that they didn't support the network and we would have to do it anyway. So, having done that, our speeds improved dramatically.

It was our router all along.

Now, in my defense, We were fooled by two things. Firstly; the dramatic slowdown in performance came at exactly the same time as our migration from Adelphia to Comcast. We assumed that Comcast was the problem because we saw that as the only thing that had changed. We assumed that there was a correlation when, in fact, it was merely coincidence.

Secondly; after spending all day troubleshooting other people's problems, we came home disinclined to do any more work. We assumed that Comcast was the problem because we saw that as the only thing that had changed.

We are, admittedly, bad customers. We are exactly the kind of people we would have to have call us for support.

So, sorry, Comcast. Sorry for maligning your reputation on unverified evidence.

Comcastic dialup

This morning's speed test turned in an abysmal 36kbs. That's no better than dialup speeds. I'm sure Comcast would say something about usage by other people brings down speed but really, how many people are on at 5:30 in the morning? And my upload speed is still a consistent 359kbs, I have these kind of results on five different pc's running four different operating systems and two different browsers.

It's Craptacular.

It's Comcastic!

When the changeover from Adelphia to Comcast occurred, I immediately noticed that an on-going issue with my e-mail (that is, not being able to access it through the POP-3 client) cleared up. It was, however, replaced by a slowness overall. Internet radio has pauses. YouTube videos have pauses. My email client doesn't connect on the first pass. A Bittorrent took four days to download.

Oh, sure, there are a few occasions when I've measured my download speed just over 2000 kbps but, for the most part, the average download speed is around 800 kbps and a typical speed is around 300 kbps. This is not their advertised 3000 kbps "Blazing Fast Speed."

I've got a new adjective for their ad men to use:

It's Craptacular.