Martin Notes

If this is the new desktop for Ubuntu then I’m going to switch back for sure: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/383

Ubuntu

Apple included a clause that developers have to develop in native iPhone code and can’t use code generators. Make a statement and digg this post: http://stopthemadnessstevejobs.com/wordpress/

Ubuntu

Ok, I’ve done it. I installed windows 7 on my viao vgn-tz21mn as my main OS. I dumped Ubuntu to join the mainstream.

First of all, why did I dump Ubuntu? Well, there were three things that bothered me:

1. It doesn’t integrate well into my working environment. I receive loads of MS Office files that just don’t work properly in Ubuntu. Open Office gives some possibilities, but it just isn’t enough. MS Word files are screwed when they are more complex than just plain text, Powerpoints look horrible when you edit them and Visio just can’t be edited or viewed at all. And, finally, we use Exchange 2007 at our company which still just doesn’t work with Evolution.
2. Battery life. Ubuntu somehow still doesn’t work as long without power as Windows does. I have nearly 7 hours with Windows and Ubuntu doesn’t give more more than 4. Since I got the Sony primarily for it’s portability, this is an essential point for me.
3. Support for multiple displays. Ubuntu just doesn’t support multiple displays correctly. It improved over the years, but it’s not stable at all. A small thing that annoys me: the Gnome icons in the panels won’t stay in the same spot when you change the resolution of the screen.

Installation

So now I installed Windows 7 Ultimate.

It took me ages to create a USB stick which I could boot from. I found a manual that works, but I had to reformat my stick to NTFS to make that work. Somehow a FAT32 filesystem just won’t do. Very irritating and, from my point of view, very unnecessary.

As soon as I had figured out how to create a installation USB stick the installation itself went as good as you expect with Windows. It’s still messy and slow, but it works. It sort of detected the hardware and installed a decent set of drivers which works. There are a couple of things that should have worked better though.

The driver for the graphics card was not the latest version. It didn’t even get updated when running Windows Update. I had to manually go to the Device Manager and select “Update Driver” to make Windows realize that it had to get the latest one. Really, really weird. Then there is the touchpad. It works with the standard PS/2 mousedriver, but it doesn’t support scrolling. Apparently Windows relies on the drivers to supply this feature. After a lot of searching, since Sony doesn’t support Windows 7 on this machine (it so old: 2 years already) I found out that I had to install the ALSP driver to make that work. I still have to work out how to make all the shortcut keys work. Volume works ok, but the brightness doesn’t.

Ah well, Ubuntu recognized everything correct during the installation and Windows, the hardware support Meister, messed up a bit. I wonder how people with less computer knowledge fix these problems? Probably they don’t, because they don’t notice them…

Windows

So now I run Windows. It runs pretty smooth and the ‘new’ Aero stuff looks quite cool. The improvements on the taskbar bring it close to being actually useful and after installing Dexpot virtual desktop manager I can even work with multiple desktops.

What keeps surprising me with Windows is that each update still leaves so many issues open from previous versions. The Device Manager for example: It is still the same as it was in Windows XP (maybe even 95, I don’t remember). It doesn’t show the hardware that your computer contains, but it shows you the Windows drivers view on that hardware. A huge difference, because Windows doesn’t always detect the correct hardware. It doesn’t even try to help you. I’ve got two “?” marked hardware entries and I had no idea what they are. After going to the “Devices and Printers” control panel (beautiful name, by the way) I found out that these are the media slots that the Sony has. Ubuntu also had some challenges there, apparently Windows also doesn’t understand them.

Somehow everything in Windows feels clumsy. I can’t help but feeling with everything I do in Windows that it could have been done much more efficient. During my search for drivers I had to visit the Microsoft driver center which required me to install an ActiveX component. This only runs in IE so I had to switch browsers first, then IE alerted me that I had to install an ActiveX, then Windows darkened my screen and alerted my that I wanted to install something and finally AVG (virus scanner) alerted my that somebody tried to install something. All of that only to find out that the driver I downloaded didn’t fix the problem.

I think Microsoft should abandon the whole GUI they have now and redesign the thing from the scratch. It’s not unusable, but it’s just not something I’d expect in 2010.

Sony

I have to make a comment about Sony and their support. Why don’t they publish the hardware that they stick in their machines? That would make finding drivers so much easier and it would remove surprises like I had: my wireless card can’t handle wireless N…

If the driver support at Sony would be brilliant then this would not matter too much, but there is room for improvement there also. There is one Windows 7 driver for the tz21mn on their support site: the Sony Update tool which keeps their Sony software up to date. Erm, right… I don’t have any Sony software on my machine, since you don’t supply it!

Apple

Maybe this Windows 7 exercise is the last push I need to switch completely to Apple. Although my recent experiments with their Airtunes also didn’t make me happy (I’ll write some more about that later). At least the Mac OS X GUI is consistent and offer feature I need. Their support for MS Office and Exchange is pretty ok, although Visio is still missing.

It seems there is no perfect solution at this moment, it’s just like the real world: I’ll have to live with imperfection

Ubuntu

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