as much as i like kubuntu 08.04.01, there is one issue that’s a pain in the netherregions: printing from java — it just doesn’t work with the sun6-java package and CUPS 1.3 (which is the default version on 08.04.01): java’s printing subsystem will just get all confused by the missing page orientation that CUPS reports back and will take a runner.

luckily, pikopong has worked out a solution: edit /etc/cups/printers.conf and add

Option orientation-requested 3

before each closing </Printer> line, save, and restart your CUPS subsystem:

# /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

done.

as part of my job i need reasonably good graphics to be able to run virtual world clients (reasonable, i’m not too greedy). when i recently got an upgrade from my “old” thinkpad x60 to a fairly new x200 with an intel GM45 inside, i was really looking forward to it improved graphics performance¹. after a bit of research it seemed that only the latest kubuntu 08.10 would fully support the graphics card.

so, after downloading the ISO image of the kubuntu 08.10 alternate boot CD² i installed it on the new x200 — after about 30min or so i had the base system installed and was ready to copy in my backed up home, project and source directories. a first glance and apt-get update; apt-get upgrade revealed: KDE4.1 was running. interesting…

…and it quickly transpired: KDE4.1, while all glamorous and flashy (lots of blink here, there, and there, there, and there) was not really on par with the powerful and versatile workhorse KDE 3.5, not at all:

• no desktop icons
• thinkpad keys (fn-f4 et al) not really working (fn returns XF86WakeUp for some strange reason)
• trying to change screen setup via system settings was a complete failure: user interface utterly confusing and apparently itself confused about the available displays (i was just trying to enable the 1600×1200 TFT and place it “next” to the x200′s LCD)
• trying to accomplish the desired display configuration via xrandr resulted in a nice and ugly crash of kwin

hmm…okaayyy. perhaps we can live with this as the intel 5100/5300 WLAN interface is working nicely…well, kind of: knetwork manager really didn’t like our company internal WLAN setup and just ignored it. not good. but then, nothing to really blame on kubuntu 08.10: knetwork manager never liked our WLAN, not in kubuntu 08.04 nor in kubuntu 07.04 — googling around once more for a possible replacement i stumble over wicd.

wicd turns out to be quite flexible and we can even add authentication schemes — it’s rather simple to add support for our internal WLAN.

next, i check whether on the secondlife client: it somehow seems a bit sluggish…well, sluggish seems to be a bit of and understatement: it’s downright jerky. running glxgears it turns out that i’m getting about 300fps — just 300fps! ouch. very ouch. turns out (k)ubuntu 8.10 has a problem with intel based GPUs.

the suggested workarounds just don’t cut it and actually result in a very unstable system: enabling the external monitor still crashes kwin; running the secondlife client sometimes works, sometimes it crashes the X server, sometimes it just causes a frozen system; suspending always kill the X server — a final attempt at upgrading to KDE 4.2beta just results in keybindings not working across reboots.

so, i decide to try running kubuntu 8.04.01 on the X200:

• X performance: consistently over 1200fps, sweet
• intel 5100/5300 WLAN: not working at first, installing the drivers from the intel linux wireless at first works, but once i try a suspend i get an ugly kernel crash — worse: on booting it crashes as well

still, WLAN can be worked around by using a USB WLAN — so, i reboot, remove the WLAN driver from the system, apply a kernel update that just became available (2.6.26-23) and reboot…

…and am utterly and completely amazed when i call up wicd to connect to the office ethernet: apparently the latest kernel update brought with it support for the intel 5100/5300

so, the latest kubuntu 08.04.01 works like a charm on the x200.

• kubuntu 08.10 on x200: keep away from it (in general even)
• kubuntu 08.04.01 on X200: recommended.

incredible as it is, GNU turns 25! unless you’ve been hibernating behind a big rock in a remote area almost off our world you must have heard about GNU — in fact, i think it’s fair to say that without GNU, without richard stallman and his vision we’d not have the internet as we know it today! not by far! software like linux, apache would not have been possible without GNU tools. even more — even if you are not aware of it, you might already be using GNU/linux in your mobile phone, your internet router, your set-top box, and so forth.

stephen fry, the “english humorist, writer, wit, actor, novelist, filmmaker and television presenter”, made a rather nice video for the occassion, entitled Freedom Fry — “Happy birthday to GNU” — see for yourself:

aside from mind-blowing software such as the GNU compiler tool chain, emacs, and lots and lots of other tools and programs, i personally think the GNU public license (GPL) is one of the most remarkable ideas that happened in software: basically it says

here is the software, here is the code, you can do with it what you want, but if you distribute it further you have to make the source available for free and if you make changes to the code you have to distribute those changes as source code for free as well

brilliant. as stephen fry puts it: that is the good science equivalent of software. we can use it, we can build on it, but so can you and you even have the right under the GPL to demand that we give you the source to our code if we distribute it ourselves.

happy birthday GNU!

since time immemorial (well, almost) i own a private epson 1260 scanner. a couple of weeks ago i — foolishly, as it turns out now — offered to my in-laws to copy all lake district articles out of our country walking collections. foolishly, because i realized that country walking must have their offices on one of those lonesome, remote fells: there are lots and lots and lots and lots of lake district articles and routes in country walking.

i started off with the gscan2pdf tool — really slow to start up, at that speed summer would be over before i had everything scanned in and converted to PDF. not good.

next try: kooka, KDE 3.5′s own scan tool — faster, but non-intuitive, you apparently have to rename and save each individual file. winter time before i’d be done.

i noticed, once again, that the epson 1260 does have a scan button (and a print and a mail and a web button) — if only that were working under linux. last time i checked for a tool (gazillion years ago), there was nothing, zilch, nix available to utilize that button. googling for plustek and scan button (the scan chipset inside the epson 1260 is a plustek chipset) this time did turn up something: scanbuttond! and even better: it’s available as a ubuntu package in hardy heron:

% apt-get install scanbuttond

installed the beast. following the instructions on the gentoo wiki gave me a working one-button-scan process! i modified the scan script slightly to deposit the fresh scan in my $HOME/tmp/scans/ directory.

converting a bunch of JPG images into a single PDF is also quite easy: you imagemagick’s convert command:¹

% convert *.jpeg allinone.pdf

voila!

just thought i’d let you participate in today’s adventure: triggered by ansgar commenting on ubuntu offering him to upgrade to ubuntu 8.04 “hardy heron” i though, “hmm, good idea, let’s do a quick update”…

…well, a couple of hours later i seemed to be back in business, hardy heron was installed on “my” x60 and i was just about do another OpenSim build — when i noticed that nant was seg faulting! now, wait a moment, it clearly was not supposed to do that. ok, can happen, what with new libs and all that. so, let’s walk on over to /usr/local/src/mono/nant-0.86b and do a re-install. should be easy, peasy…

…except it wasn’t: mono’s compiler mcs kept seg faulting as well! hmmm.

ok. let’s reinstall mono. following my own script i started the re-install — which crashed as well after about 5min of mucking around.

panic stations!

googling around it transpired that this would happen when running hardy heron with a custom compiled kernel of pre-2.6.24 vintage — which i was

i’m happy to report that with 2.6.25 mono is running again

to run the most recent libsecondlife release you need to have at least mono 1.9 installed. the following step-by-step recipe applies to a ubuntu 7.10 system and you should be root:

installing pre-reqs

apt-get install build-essential bison gawk
apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
apt-get install libpng12-dev libx11-dev libfontconfig1-dev 
apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libjpeg62-dev libtiff4-dev 
apt-get install libungif4-dev libexif-dev libcairo2-dev
apt-get install libpango1.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libglade2-dev
apt-get install libgnome2-dev libgnomecanvas2-dev libgnomeui-dev
apt-get install libgnomeprint2.2-dev libgnomeprintui2.2-dev 
apt-get install libpanel-applet2-dev libgtksourceview-dev
apt-get install libgtkhtml3.14-dev

installing libgdiplus

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/libgdiplus/libgdiplus-1.9.tar.bz2
tar xvf libgdiplus-1.9.tar.bz2
cd libgdiplus-1.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

installing mono

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/mono/mono-1.9.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-1.9.tar.bz2 
cd mono-1.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

installing nant

wget http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nant/nant-0.86-beta1-src.tar.gz
tar xvf nant-0.86-beta1-src.tar.gz
cd nant-0.86-beta1
make install prefix=/usr/local

you now have the base setup, which is sufficient for building and running libsecondlife and opensim. the following packages are add-ons that are nice-to-have but not necessary-to-have. i do recommend installing the monodoc & mono-tools stuff, however — it makes live easier

gtk-sharp

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/gtk-sharp210/gtk-sharp-2.10.4.tar.bz2
tar xvf gtk-sharp-2.10.4.tar.bz2
cd gtk-sharp-2.10.4
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

gnome-sharp

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/gnome-sharp2/gnome-sharp-2.16.1.tar.gz
tar xvf gnome-sharp-2.16.1.tar.gz
cd gnome-sharp-2.16.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

gtksourceview-sharp

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/gtksourceview-sharp2/gtksourceview-sharp-2.0-0.12.tar.bz2
tar xvf gtksourceview-sharp-2.0-0.12.tar.bz2
cd gtksourceview-sharp-2.0-0.12
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

monodoc & mono-tools

to get the monodoc C# documentation viewer (recommended!) we need to install the monodoc package and the mono-tools package. monodoc itself needs to be installed inside the mono-1.9 source directory¹ from above.

cd mono-1.9 # this is the source directory from the above
wget  http://go-mono.com/sources/monodoc/monodoc-1.9.zip
unzip monodoc-1.9.zip
cd monodoc-1.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ../..

next, install mono-tools:

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/mono-tools/mono-tools-1.9.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-tools-1.9.tar.bz2
cd mono-tools-1.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

configure will mumble about gecko-sharp.dll not being build, that’s ok, just ignore it.

as you hopefully have not noticed (well, there was some downtime, but not more than usually afflicted by cablecom) i switched xyzzyxyzzy.net from gentoo to running ubuntu server 7.10 on monday.¹ along with that came a reorganization of the web server directory layout — and i took the chance to clean up. pretty much everything is running again (and thx to having that complete backup of the mysql databases all blogs and photo blogs are back as well — with the exception of the QR code stuff, which was not really generating QR codes for new posts anymore.

this had me baffled as all the path names and what have you were looking ok, permission were fine, the works. still no QR codes and the test image wouldn’t work either…i did manage to get it working, here’s a brief overview² of what i did:

# install command line php5 so that we can poke at the php code manually, so to speak
% sudo apt-get install php5-cli

# qrcode lib lives in /usr/local/share/qrcode/qrcode_php0.50beta10
% cd /usr/local/share/qrcode/qrcode_php0.50beta10

# let's try invoking the sample.php via php5
% php5 sample.php
[...lots of error messages...]

those error messages revealed that i had forgotten to adjust QRCODE_DATA_PATH — for some strange reason, wp-qrcode doesn’t get that across from the wordpress configuration — fixing that path fixed the problem. sweat

define ("QRCODE_DATA_PATH","/usr/local/share/qrcode/qrcode_php0.50beta10/qrcode_data");

my X60 keyboard has those rather convenient “next page” and “previous page” keys (located just above and to the side of the cursor keys) which i’m using to switch to the next or previous tab in konsole and firefox:

• adding support for that in konsole was rather easy: just use konsole’s “settings->configure shortcuts…” (go to next session/go to previous session),
• adding support for it in firefox was still easy: get keyconfig and configure “f4kc_NextTab” on F20, and “f4kc_PrevTab” on F19

pidgin was not that easy. turns out key configurations are hard coded for stuff like the switching to next tab¹

as i’m running ubuntu i wanted to use the existing ubuntu pidgin package and modify it for my purposes. i found a nice HOWTO at cyberciti describing how to rebuild a ubuntu (or debian package from source):

# if you've installed this stuff before, skip this step
% apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev     
% mkdir pidgin
% cd pidgin
% apt-get source pidgin
% apt-get build-dep pidgin
% dpkg-source -x pidgin_2.2.1-1ubuntu4.1.dsc
% cd pidgin-2.2.1
% # modify pidgin source
% dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
% cd ..
% dpkg -i pidgin*.deb

and here’s the diff to apply to pidgin/gtkconv.c:

*** gtkconv.c.orig      2008-01-31 20:09:24.000000000 +0100
--- gtkconv.c   2008-01-31 20:10:46.000000000 +0100
***************
*** 1899,1904 ****
--- 1899,1919 ----
                                return TRUE;
                        }
                        break;
+               case GDK_F20:
+                       if (!pidgin_conv_window_get_gtkconv_at_index(win, curconv + 1))
+                               gtk_notebook_set_current_page(GTK_NOTEBOOK(win->notebook), 0);
+                       else
+                               gtk_notebook_set_current_page(GTK_NOTEBOOK(win->notebook), curconv + 1);
+                       return TRUE;
+                       break;
+
+               case GDK_F19:
+                       if (!pidgin_conv_window_get_gtkconv_at_index(win, curconv - 1))
+                               gtk_notebook_set_current_page(GTK_NOTEBOOK(win->notebook), -1);
+                       else
+                               gtk_notebook_set_current_page(GTK_NOTEBOOK(win->notebook), curconv - 1);
+                       return TRUE;
+                       break;
                }
        }
        return FALSE;

oh, and here’s my “$HOME/.xmodmaprc”:

keycode 144 = XF86AudioPrev
keycode 153 = XF86AudioNext
keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay
keycode 164 = XF86AudioStop
keycode 146 = XF86ScreenSaver
keycode 227 = Menu
keycode 249 = XF86ZoomIn
keycode 234 = F19
keycode 233 = F20

i’ve placed a little script in “$HOME/.kde/Autostart”:

#!/bin/bash
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmaprc

to have those keybindings set up on login.

just been looking at the definitive mobile phone project, the one to rule them all and came across the following youtube clip:

not much to add…except:

while i’ve been using knetworkmanager and its side-kick kicker applet rather successfully on our private laptops (all running kubuntu now), it’s never been an option for my IBM laptop (both meanings of the words apply here as we are using the IEEE8021X variant (with X.509 certificates) for controlling access to the internal network — something which knetworkmanager does not seem to support.

what i’ve been using is a pre-up script to start wpa_supplicant on my WLAN interface. that usually works ok — it usually does fail once i try to access a public WLAN or my private WLAN at home: then it becomes an elaborate dance of killing the ipw3945 daemon (the X60 has an intel ipw3945 WLAN card), unloading the ipw3945 module, waiting a bit, and reload the the ipw3945 module…followed by hoping that wpa_supplicant will pick up the current WLAN…which it very often does but then doesn’t get the DHCP lease…hmph

my first attempt was to use debian’s wpa-roam feature (kubuntu being a debian based system): works nicely with the work network and our WPA/WPA2 setup at home — but fails to pickup public WLANs after a suspend–resume cycle

next attempt (after trying all kinds of things…long story) is to use the managed approach in /etc/network/interfaces:

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
        wpa-driver wext

iface default inet dhcp

iface home inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid                homessid
        wpa-ap-scan             2
        wpa-scan-ssid           1
        wpa-psk                 secret
        wpa-proto               RSN
        wpa-key-mgmt            WPA-PSK
        wpa-pairwise            CCMP

iface otherhome inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid                otherhomessid
        wpa-ap-scan             2
        wpa-scan-ssid           1
        wpa-psk                 anothersecret
        wpa-key-mgmt            WPA-PSK
        wpa-pairwise            CCMP

iface work inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid                WORK
        wpa-ap-scan             2
        wpa-scan-ssid           1
        wpa-key-mgmt            IEEE8021X
        wpa-pairwise            TKIP
        wpa-group               WEP104
        wpa-eap                 TLS
        wpa-identity            identity@work.com
        wpa-ca-cert             /home/dirk/certificates/work-root-cert.pem
        wpa-client-cert         /home/dirk/certificates/dirk-cert.pem"
        wpa-private-key         /home/dirk/certificates/dirk-key.pem"
        wpa-private-key-passwd  yetanothersecret

iface public inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid                ""
        wpa-ap-scan             2
        wpa-scan-ssid           1
        wpa-key-mgmt            NONE

i’m making use of the logical interface concept of kubuntu/debian here. to activate the WLAN for at home use i’d do:

ifup wlan0=home

to shut it down again, a simple

ifdown wlan0

does the job. likewise for the other WLANs.

that finally does seem to do the trick.