Martin Notes

Like a lot of people, I’ve also been having performance problems with my intel based graphics since the release of Jaunty. I found a little article that describes how you can install a newer kernel in your Ubuntu 9.04.

I’ve been using it for a day now and I have the advantages of the new kernel: faster graphics and faster sleep & wakeup. The only thing I had to do to get my system fully up and running was to recompile the kernel module for VirtualBox, something you’ll have to do anyway when you install a new kernel.

Ubuntu

Yeah, somebody finally figured out how to make flash work in Chromium. Have a look at this blog. I checked it with youtube and it worked fine!

Ubuntu

Speed

With the recent release of Firefox 3.5 the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is really available for the ‘normal’ user (ie. not the alpha/beta users). It gives you a major speed increase in JavaScript intensive webapps. But how does it compare to Google’s Chromium?

To find out I ran the SunSpider JavaScript performance tests on both browsers. I know the SunSpider tests come from the WebKit team, who provide the HTML rendering for Google Chrome, but it was the best test for JavaScript I could find.

The results can be found here: Firefox 3.5, Chromium.

What it comes down to is that Firefox 3.5 used 3691ms and Chromium used 1476 ms to complete the tests. So Chromium is still significantly faster then Firefox.

Features

Since Chromium is still in the alpha stages of development it is not fair to compare the browsers on the feature level. Chromium doesn’t support much more then the pure browsing experience. It shows the first signs of form prefill, which works quite good and it is able to remember your passwords, which also works. But that’s it. Comparing that to Firefox’s feature list doesn’t make sense.

Firefox is still the clear winner here, Chromium still has a long, long way to go before it can compete with the build in features of Firefox. And then I’m not even discussing the add-ons that have been written for Firefox already, Chromium still has a lot of caching up to do on that front.

Conclusion

I’ll keep using Firefox for a while. Chromium is still too unstable and just doesn’t have enough features to make every day usage possible for me. I see that Chromium is moving in the right direction with it’s development, but I’m wondering how long it will take them to get there. Mozilla’s Firefox has improved a lot with the release of 3.5. It shows that they woke up and are looking to make the browser not only feature rich, but also fast.

Ubuntu

In iPhone OS 3 Apple decided to make it possible to use the iPhone as a modem for your computer. But they also decided to make that only possible for certain networks. However they apparently didn’t want to make it too complicated for you to ‘hack’ this.

To get it working with my Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope I had to do the following:

• Install an iPhone config file tethervodafonenlzakelijk

• Install Blueman

iPhone configuration

In this article (in Dutch) it is described how to configure the iPhone to use the Vodafone network for tethering.  I have a Vodafone business account, so I used the link that’s at the end of the article: http://helvensteijn.com/files/vodafone-tether/tether.html. That is the same file as referenced above, but I downloaded it so I wouldn’t loose track of it.

What do you need to do? Download the iPhone configuration file on your iPhone. It will ask you if you trust the supplier (that’s up to you….) and, if so, install it. That’s it. You can now enable tethering by going to: Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering.

Blueman

To install the blueman bluetooth application you need to added the blueman PPA to your Software Sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Add the blueman gpg file to the authentication tab. And install blueman:

sudo apt-get install blueman

After the install I had to run an software update to update to the latest bluetooth software:

sudo apt-get update

After that I removed the Bluetooth Manager from the Startup Applications and made sure that the Blueman Applet was in there. Since I’m lazy I restarted to remove the Bluetooth Manager and activate the Blueman Applet, but I’m sure there are more efficient ways of doing that.

When you have Blueman up and runnning, just click on the bluetooth icon in the notification area, pair the iPhone and right click on the phone to connect the network.

Ubuntu

Here is a nice article that contains a script to let Skype use the Ubuntu notifications: http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/06/ubuntu-jaunty-notification-system-for.html

[Update] On request (see comments), please visit: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1146775 for updates and comments

Ubuntu

I’ve been spending a lot of time at a client that doesn’t allow foreign laptops on its network. This means that I can’t be online a lot of the time, which is rather problematic since we work with off shore teams and I’d like to be able to contact them. So I thought I’d buy a UMTS usb dongle to be able to be online all the time. I’ve read quite a lot on the support of Ubuntu of broadband mobile connections and I expected to insert the dongle and start working. Sadly that was not the case.

On inserting the dongle nothing happened. After some research it looked like the kernel didn’t recognize the usb for what it was, but it tried to mount it as a drive. This appears to be a known problem since the dongle also contains a drive with drivers for Windows and Mac.

The model number on the dongle is: K3520-Z. The following shows how I got it to work properly.

Find vendor and product ID

First of all you have to find the vendor and product IDs. For this you run:

lsusb

This shows you a list of connected usb devices which looks something like:

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 044e:300d Alps Electric Co., Ltd Bluetooth Controller (ALPS/UGPZ6)
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05ca:183a Ricoh Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp. HighSpeed Hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 054c:02d5 Sony Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 012: ID 19d2:2000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

The Vodafone device is listed without a vendor name, that’s how you can recognize it. In the list above the vendor:product ID is: 19d2:2000.

Kernel parameters

You should add these to your kernel parameters to explain the kernel that it is a serial device. For that you open the menu.lst file.

sudo pico /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the kernel boot entry and add:

usbserial.vendor=0x19d2 usbserial.product=0x2000

At the end of the kernel you start. The whole line looks something like:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=3021230a-6c89-43f9-9e69-5d95dde4ff9b ro quiet splash usbserial.vendor=0x19d2 usbserial.product=0x2000

Install drivers

When you’ve done that you should install the vodafone drivers from betavine:

• usb-modeswitch_0.9.7_i386.deb
• vodafone-mobile-connect_svn20090502_all.deb

I’m not sure why these are required, but they seem to install something that picks up the dongle when you insert it.

NOTE: running the Vodafone connect script didn’t work for me.

Configure connection

Finally you go to the Network Connections (System > Preferences > Network Connections) and add the connections in  the Mobile Broadband tab. Don’t forget to enter your pin code!

Restart

Then you should restart to activate the kernel parameters. After the restart I inserted the dongle and repeated:

 dmesg

Until I saw:

[ 1303.650357] option 2-2:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.651186] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 1303.654780] option 2-2:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.654907] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 1303.657438] option 2-2:1.3: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.657549] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB3
[ 1303.659483] option 2-2:1.4: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.659594] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB4
[ 1303.661613] scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[ 1303.663691] usb-storage: device found at 11
[ 1303.663697] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

Connect

Then the NetworkManager dropdown (left mouse click on the network icon) shows the Broadband Modem entry. You can click on it to activate the connection. It’s not 100% stable for me, but the connection works good enough once it’s connected.

When I had my wireless and the 3G connection open I ended with a completely frozen machine. I fixed that by disabling my wireless on the hardware level. That is: turn off the switch.

Ubuntu

My wife asked me to migrate her gossip blog from Serendipity to Wordpress. Since my coding qualities have nearly died I decided to build the migrator in PHP.

My approach was simple: connect to the Serendipity database, read the entries table, generate a Wordpress export XML and import that into Wordpress. The Wordpress export XML format is really simple, it comes down to RSS deluxe.

The migrator is easy to use:

1. Fill the Serendipity database connection details in the script
2. Upload the script to the serendipity server
3. Request the script in a browser, or using wget
4. Save the result in a file
5. Import the file into wordpress

You can download the script: serrendipity_to_wordpressphptar.

That leaves you with a filled Wordpress database. However the images are still missing. Serendipity stores the images in its upload directory. In my case this was in the root of the site: /uploads. Just copy the full directory to the root of the Wordpress server solved the problem.

My wife still has to complete the new site, but the migration is a success. Which leaves me with a happy wife and the good feeling of having completed a bit of coding.

Ubuntu

Visit this article for an overview about the new development in commercial operating systems. The article focuses on Windows, but the same applies to Mac OS X. I like the fact that it makes Linux a principle choice, not only a cheap one.

Linux

Right now we’re all happy with our Jaunty Jackalope, but we need to keep looking forward. The release of Karmic Koala (9.10) is scheduled for October this year. It’s planned to have the following features:

• A graphic update
• Full graphical boot
• Fancy graphical login
• New Gnome
• For the server it will support cloud features

An interesting release to look forward to.

Check the release schedule at Ubuntu.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu 9.04 has been released yesterday and of course I installed it immediately. I’ve been running the 9.04 release since the alphas, but the Ubuntu tradition is that the release is much better then the pre-releases.

Installation

For the installation I decided to use a separate boot partition which should make it more easy to have multiple systems on my laptop. I’ve tried this two times, but sadly this resulted in a kernel panic telling me something about a failed synchronization. So I skipped the boot partition setup and installed the boot files on the system partition. That worked just fine.

The installation itself is smooth and easy to understand. The most improved part is the timezone selection, that works fine now opposed to the crappy version in 8.10.

Updates

After installation I did my usual updates:

• Gnome-DO
• Restricted extras
• Microsoft fonts
• VirtualBox
• Compiz Config Settings Manager
• Skype
• Global Menu
• Removed the idiotic lower Gnome panel

All of those worked fine, for some of them I had to update the software sources, but that was no problem.

Then I went into my usual tweaking: themes. I’m now running the Dust theme which is delivered with Ubuntu these days. It’s a nice quiet theme that requires little screenspace.

NTP

After the visual stuff had been taken care of I ended up with a problem I always had with Ubuntu: installing the NTP time service. Somehow I never can get it to work from the Time and Date admin panel. It always crashes for a while and after a couple of tries it works. A strange bug that has been around for a while now.

Up and running

Now the system is working and all my stuff is installed again (1.5 hours after starting the install), I’m playing with it. It’s fast, the ext4 filesystem seems to make the system more responsive. Starting OpenOffice’s word processor takes a while the first time, but it’s lightning fast the second. Everything in the system feels snappy and robust.

On the functional level nothing really changed from 8.10. The system is nearly the same as 8.10. Of course OpenOffice has been updated to 3.0, but I had that version running on 8.10 for ages already. Brasero has been added, nice, but I don’t burn CDs anymore. When I look at the work I do with my laptop the 9.04 is exactly the same as 8.10.

The new boot splash and the notifications are nice, but they are not a major upgrade. They add to the overall robust feel of the system, however.

Evolution and Exchange 2007

My personal frustration, using Evolution with Exchange 2007, still hasn’t been solved. You can install the evolution-mape package from synaptic now, but it doesn’t work for me. The configuration is sloppy and difficult to understand and from what I’ve read it still doesn’t provide all functionality. That means that I’m still required to run Windows XP in VirtualBox. Too bad.

Conclusion

I knew that 9.04 was not going to be a major step forward. Ubuntu has always taken a evolutionary approach to their development. The system is faster and more stable then 8.10, but it’s not a major step. I must admit that I expect a bigger improvement from being able to use Chrome on Linux then from upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10.

So, what’s new? Nothing much really. Stuff has been changed under the hood, but the end user will not really notice that. It’s still a stable and modern system, but I think some real inovation would really help to make Ubuntu more widely used.

Linux