Martin Notes

Maybe the next challenge for the free days: http://kernel.org/. The 2.6.28 linux kernel has been released. Improvements include: GPU memory manager and ext4 support

Linux 2.6.28, kernel, Linux

I have a bit of an obsession with getting Ubuntu to work with MS Exchange 2007. On the website of Johnny Jacob I read that they have started to publish source releases of the plugin. So I downloaded the source of the 0.25.3 release and started fixing dependencies.

First of all you have to fix the pkg-config path setting. I find this weird, since I have to set it to the default setting, ah well. Do this:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH

Then I had to replace some version numbers in the config. This sounds strange, but Johnny said it would work. Although I made a broad interpretation of his comment.

replace 2.25.2 with 2.24.2 in configure.in
replace 2.25.2 with 2.24.2 in configure

Of course there is a list of dependencies to fulfill:

sudo apt-get install intltool libmapi-dev evolution-data-server-dev evolution-dev libtalloc-dev libdcerpc-dev libsamba-hostconfig-dev libldb-dev libebackend1.2-dev libecal1.2-dev libedata-cal1.2-dev libebook1.2-dev libedata-book1.2-dev

Sadly that’s where things went wrong. The libldb-dev depends on libldb0, but to install libldb0 I need to remove libldb-samba4-0, libmapi-dev and libmapi0, which broke the dependencies:

For now I’ll have to wait until this issue is fixed.

Linux, Ubuntu Exchange, Linux, OpenChange, Ubuntu

The iPhone contains a nice 3G radio and a bluetooth radio, so I thought I’d let my Ubuntu laptop connect to the Internet through the iPhone’s 3G. A little research showed that it is quite straight forward to connect Ubuntu to a 3G service there days (since 8.10), so I didn’t expect a lot of problems.

To my surprise the setup failed at the very first step. I checked the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities by finding the bluetooth address:

hcitool scan

And looking up the capabilities:

sdptool browse <address> | grep Networking

To my surprise the iPhone doesn’t support a dailup connection through bluetooth. Isn’t it rather strange that Apple sells us a phone that doesn’t allow us to share it’s network with the rest of the world? I would assume the TelCos wouldn’t mind, actually I’m surprised they even accepted it.

Apple has been down this road before, the whole Mac OS 9 and earlier was closed to the outside world. You’d have to buy Apple stuff to make it work. Mac OS X improved that a lot, and the hardware support also improved: USB, standard VGA. It’s strange to see that Apple is going back to the more closed approach now. The iPod was still a bit open; you can upload songs from Linux, but the iPhone can’t even be used without iTunes.

Watch it Apple, you won’t be able to hold this so much longer. There will be competition at some point, and then people will start to make different choices. So far you’ve been the best in what you’re doing, but you’re not the only one.

I hope Apple will start seeing that competition is not bad, but that they should learn from them.

Linux, Opinion, Personal, Ubuntu, iPhone bluetooth, iPhone, Linux, Ubuntu

I’ve been having problems with the automatic updates of OpenOffice 3.0. I’ve been using this PPA:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

And automated update gives me the option to do a partial update, which doesn’t work either. Irritating! After some googling I found the following:

That fixed the problem! Update works and OpenOffice works. What I couldn’t find out is whether OO actually updated. That’s not the important part, since it worked fine and it still does.

Linux, Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice, Ubuntu

VirtualBox 2.1 has been released. Apparently it is a major update from the 2.0.6 release. Check this installation guide to update or install.

Linux, Opinion, Ubuntu, Web Linux, Ubuntu, VirtualBox

I’ve been fighting with some stuff in Ubuntu that is pretty straight forward on Windows.

The first was as easy as it gets: editing word documents. It seems that the word documents that OpenOffice delivers have a quite bad layout. Especially the content index is lousy. I must say I’m annoyed by this, I really try to use FOS for everything, but in my job I encounter a lot of MS Word documents. I need to be able to create and edit them.

The second was: we (Componence) switched to Exchange 2007. Ah well, that’s really old, so I guess Evolution supports that. It doesn’t. F*ck! It will be supported in the next release of Gnome, if they (Novell) are able to resolve some licence problems.

The third is that I’d like to be able to use an extra monitor on my laptop. I’ve been using the external monitor as a mirror for ages now, but a real spanning desktop would be nice. It turns out that this is really simple. Why didn’t anyone try to implement that in a way that doesn’t require any config file changing? This is way too simple, and possible for nearly a year already!

The last point made me find a weird thing in Compiz: it can’t handle a viewport larger then 2048 wide or 2048 high. Ehm?

The word file and exchange crap made me install Windows in a Virtual box. I have this open constantly and I spend a lot of my time working in Windows again. I hate it!

Linux, Opinion, Ubuntu disappointment, Linux

I’ve been using OpenOffice 3 beta for a while now and I must say it’s much better then 2.4. I contains some of the features I’ve always liked in MS Office, like comments at the side of the document and language selection. Both were pretty crappy in 2.4… I also have the feeling that the MS Word file format support has improved a bit, at least the bug that a document becomes read only when you add an index (how do you build a bug like that???) has been fixed.

There is still room for improvement. For example: it’s still not possible to accept changes with the right mouse key. This would really make merging changes much easier then it is now.

I hope that the support of the ODF format in MS Office will come fast, then I can just send ODF document to my collegues and clients. That would really make life much better, finally kill that idiotic MS Word format!

Linux, Opinion Linux, open office 3 beta

Why is AWN such a crap product. It looks beautiful, but it crashes, the UI is hopeless and some stuff just doesn’t work. I really don’t understand why it seems to be so complicated to create a dock for linux that just works. Is that really so hard to do?

A dock should work like AWN, but then not show the stuff that AWN shows when you startup. The notification area should look a bit better then it does now. The hide/show should work, can somebody think what should happen when you open a menu or popup (the terminal popup is great) and the dock hides? Should the dock even hide then? It should be possible to put the dock on the upper, left and right part of the screen.

All pretty basic stuff, but it seems our coding friends out there can’t get it done. I hope they will at some point, because the Gnome panel is worthless and it’s time for something new. Until then I’ll have to live with AWN.

GUI, Linux AWN, GUI, Linux