This Old Blog

Last post I wrote about what I wanted in Project2015. This post is about what won't be here. In general, technology. Posts about Linux are a good example of this, as well as reviews of hardware (camera gear, primarily, followed by computers). I have a second blog, Arcane Science Lab , that is specifically for my technology side. If you want to read what I have to say about technology they you should meander over there. I wrote this post after looking at the statistics on this blog and noticing that folks are still finding my old Linux posts. The last time I wrote about Linux was back in November of 2013. It was about Ubuntu 13.10, among other distributions. Since then I've moved on to 14.04 LTS, and now to 14.10. Ubuntu is my primary (my only, to be honest) Linux distribution. It works well and I know how to tweak it to do exactly what I want in a mere minutes after initial installation. It runs the latest Oracle Java, as well as the latest Android tools (see above), among...

Linux Mint 16 RC VM running Java 7 u45, Apache ServiceMix 4.5.3, and Google Chrome 31 I've installed two more Linux VMs on my little ol' Windows 8.1 notebook using VMware Player 6.0.1. They're Linux Mint 16 RC and Fedora 20 Beta. No need to clog the entry with numerous installation screen captures from both; if you've worked with either Linux Mint 15 or Fedora 19, then there's little if any difference between the two. The primary reasons for moving up to the next release are the software updates. I installed both with the Cinnamon alternative desktop. From a personal perspective I prefer Linux Mint 16's Cinnamon over Fedora's because of Mint's leaner window decorations. When I can change the desktop wallpaper and be done with personalizing for productive use I call that a small personal victory. That happened with Mint, but I still wanted to find a way to narrow the rather large window top, and paradoxically, widen the rest of the window borders ...

Ubuntu Gnome (Gnome 3 + Ubuntu 13.10) Last night my copy of VMware Player 6 automatically updated itself to version 6.0.1. In the process the VMware Tools that are installed on the various virtual machines were also updated, in particular those for the latest Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 13.10. Under VMware Player 6 the shared directory kernel module failed to compile . Under 6.0.1 the module successfully compiled, installed, and executed, allowing my Share directory on the Windows 8.1 host side to be seen. And of course, as I reported earlier after repairing the version 6 installation , networking out of the VM into the outside world is working just fine. Gnome 3 showing some of its hidden capabilities As the picture captions note, this is Ubuntu Gnome , a distribution built up from Gnome 3.8 and Ubuntu 13.10 . This combination has resulted in a stable and pleasant distribution. I find it somewhat amusing that two of the more controversial desktops (Gnome 3 and Unity...

Over the weekend I upgraded to Windows 8.1, then discovered that networking for the virtual machines wouldn't work. Then I tried something incredibly simple and fixed the problem. Checking the system I noticed that three VMware Windows services weren't running; VMnetDHCP, VMUSBArbService, and VMwareNatService. VMware Player allows you to install, remove, or fix an existing installation. I chose to try fixing the installation, and that fixed the problem. The services were re-installed/restarted, and the virtual machines had networking again. Once network connectivity was established there was exactly one updated file for Ubuntu 13.10, a data file. This underscores how solid and finished the release was this time. Every other version of every other Linux installation I've ever dealt with has always been succeeded by boatloads of updates after the initial installation. But not this time. Everything is working properly on my notebook. All's right with the world.

Update 26 October 2013 All of this has been overcome by events (OBE) as noted in this post:  http://blogbeebe.blogspot.com/2013/10/ubuntu-1310-windows-81-vmware-player.html tl;dr - It's all fixed now. Original It hardly took any time at all for me to download the Ubuntu 13.10 ISO file and install the latest Ubuntu as a virtual machine on VMware Player 6 running on my shiny new Windows 8.1 system. For the most part it's been error and trouble free. Except for one issue, which I'll get to shortly. But first, all the good news. I've read the various "reviews" [sic] from the various online tech pubs, most notably Ars Technica, and the general consensus is "meh." There are times where meh is a Good Thing. The one feature (if you want to call it that) about Ubuntu 13.10 is the polish applied to 13.04. Just as Windows 8.1 can be considered a polished Windows 8, instead of a major new upgrade. In the pell-mell rush to release software to stay ahe...

Fedora 19 virtualized on my Windows 8 desktop It's been a while since I commented about Linux. I've been very busy with my career changes as well as learning a new set of skills associated with that career change, including some travel. My use of Linux has settled down as a super-application that runs on top of my Windows 8 system (running on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos). I have four distributions installed these days; Fedora 19, Linux Mint 15, CentOS 5 and CentOS 6. The CentOS installations are there primarily as my final testing sandboxes for RHEL 5 and 6, respectively. Otherwise I do my leading testing and development on Mint and Fedora, usually in that order. Here's a quick rundown of my experiences and observations to date running Linux in this way. Linux Mint 15 . By far and away the cleanest and easiest to work with. Its gcc and clang/llvm installations aren't up-to-date with the latest and greatest as the versions installed on Fedora, so if I really ...

Logged in and getting ready to do something... dangerous? Fedora 19 hit the bricks sometime Tuesday, 2 July. And I dutifully downloaded yet another DVD ISO (at around 4.2GB) of the latest release and installed it in a VMware Player virtual machine. I've trimmed the number of Linux VMs I carry around these days to just two; Fedora and Linux Mint. And when I was ready to install Fedora 19, I blew away Fedora 18. I don't bother to keep any older releases anymore, and make no attempt to upgrade any older releases either. I was pleasantly surprised this time around with how Fedora looked and installed, for the most part. I'll explain what few things I didn't like as I come to them. And this time, I'm going to do something I haven't done in a long time; I'm going to display a series of screen captures to illustrate my points. One of the very first pleasant surprises to great me was at first boot. Fedora 19 has provided a very clean, very professional lang...

Windows 8 desktop with task manager and VMware Player booting Linux Mint 15 Back in my last job I got into the habit of installing every Linux distribution when it was newly released. The primary reason was to keep tabs on the evolution of the various distributions. The secondary reason was because VirtualBox, and later VMware Player, forgave a host of sins when trying to install Linux on bare metal, not the least of which was lack of driver support for the latest and greatest peripherals that were evolving at a mad pace on their own. I quickly discovered I had far greater success installing Linux virtually than I ever did directly on a notebook or desktop computer. The icing on the cake was the rapid realization that I didn't have to wipe a drive when I wanted to install a different version of a different distribution. VMs were basically very large disk files, and as long as I had enough disk space (growing from the hundreds of gigs into the single terabytes) I could just crea...

Fedora 18 was officially released yesterday after a long troubled gestation period. I downloaded the DVD ISO from the Ga Tech mirror and burned it to physical media before heading home. I also had done the same with openSUSE 12.2. I had picked up a Seagate 500GB 7200 RPM notebook drive for around $70 at a local Best Buy. I was fully prepared to go home and install either one of those on my wife's prior white MacBook 4,1. After putting in the new drive I first tried to install Fedora 18. It would never boot on the MacBook, instead dumping me out at a raw grub prompt. I tried several different ways to boot Fedora 18 on that MacBook, but gave up and installed openSUSE 12.2 instead. The openSUSE install was mostly successful, in that I was able to get it onto the hard disk and have it boot afterwords. But after an hour of just moving around in the environment, I pulled out the old Snow Leopard DVD and installed a fresh copy of Mac OS X on the notebook. After picking up all the up...

Well, I'm back to Fedora 17. I've learned a lot these past two days, and I managed to get WiFi working. You know what the problem was? Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? The bloody external switch was off. Yes, off. When I bothered to look at the side of the notebook and saw the state of the switch I could have screamed. I had basically forgotten that it was even there. I looked at my E6510 that runs Windows 7 Enterprise, and yes, the switch enables WiFi. And of course it works. But the switch on the side of the E6510 I've been installing various Linux distributions on, it was disabled (red showing on the switch). As soon as I turned it on the WiFi icon changed state on the panel. And it found all the local WiFi hotspots. And I was able to log in just like I log in for every device in this house, from Windows notebook to Apple Macbook to smartphone and all the various Barnes & Noble tablets. And WiFi under Fedora 17 on the E6510 with Centrino 6300 WiFi ...

I've been spending far too much time with this over the weekend, but then, I figure why not. This is one of the few times I can install Linux distributions with impunity. So I grabbed a DVD ISO of the latest openSUSE, version 12.2. Funnily enough I installed the Gnome 3 desktop (Gnome 3.6 according to the openSUSE site) rather than the KDE desktop. After messing with the latest Gnome 3 desktop while I had Fedora running I actually liked the underlying technology, if not the visible implementation. When openSUSE finished installing I found I liked it's implementation a bit more than Fedora's, primarily for such little touches as a computer shutdown entry on the far upper right drop-down user menu. In the end I would up installing Cinnamon 1.6.1 as my desktop. I would have done the same under Fedora 17, something I'd already said I would in an earlier post. With Cinnamon I finally have a desktop with a minimal touch that reminds me a bit of the Metro desktop and Go...

Fedora 17 base install with Gnome 3 before a massive update I spent the majority of last week at an integration event. Part of the toolkit I took with me was a Dell Latitude E6510 with RHEL 6.3 installed. Running on top of that was VMware Player to host several VMs that ran additional systems as part of the event. I'd also installed Google's exfat driver to support a 64GB SDXC card and additional drivers from EPEL to support a 500GB LaCie external drive formated as NTFS. It was a decent enough system, and certainly supported the integration event to a very successful conclusion. When I got back home, however, I wanted a more advanced kernel on the notebook, one that had a chance of supporting the E6510's wifi wireless chipset. The older driver under RHEL couldn't see it (or I never saw it with the tools), so I installed Fedora 17 to get at least the drivers installed. Sure enough, dmesg logs that the Intel wifi chipset was found and enabled on boot: [ 5.40642...

There's an place at the intersection of East Colonial and North Ferncreek called Ice Cold Auto Air . They've been there so long (since 1964) they've become something of a landmark. Right under their sign they have this heavily customized VW minibus which has been painted up in various color schemes for years. Recently it was given yet another paint job and given something of a name. It's now called "Penguin Power." It looks all cute and interesting from the outside, but a quick peek into the interior tells a slightly different tale. The panels are missing from inside the doors. The dash had been reconstructed from "home brew" materials, and spray painted interesting shades. Wires dangle from beneath the dash and some feed directly through the front sheet metal to the lights outside. Some of the interior material is torn, exposing yellow filler foam. The interior looks like it's usable, but it's definitely not the kind of vehicle you...

Well, I gave it the old college try and tried to create an up-to-date Mono development environment on top of my aging Fedora 14 installation. I should have know better , considering how many times in the past I've beaten myself bloody with some specific feature of Linux. It all started innocently enough. I cloned a copy of Mono from their git repository and built it without any issues. I wrote a number of increasingly complex C# applications to test the compiler and runtime. No problems were encountered. But I noticed I couldn't compile or run any GUI applications. Complimenting that was a lack of MonoDevelop 3 , the Mono/C# development IDE. When I started to dig into how to build and run that particular tool, I ran into problems. Fedora 14, released November 2010, is running Gnome 2.32. Fedora 14 is the last Fedora release to run Gnome 2. Fedora moved to Gnome 3 starting with version 15, and that's one important reason why I stayed with Fedora 14 and continue to stay ...

It's been a while since I touched my personal Android 4 repository hosted on my aging Latitude D630 and its Fedora 14 installation. I started hosting (and building) Android 4 just to get the experience in handling that particular project, as well as creating my own version of ICL to run on my Nook Color (Encore). The directions were initially written for CyanogenMod 7.x (Gingerbread) but are still pretty accurate (for the most part) for CyanogenMod 9.x (Ice Cream Sandwich). The only problem being the following: After performing repo sync (which is what I started with this time), during the build process, I ran into a build-halting error where libjackpal-androidterm4.so could not be found. Sure enough I didn't have that, just the earlier libjackpal-androidterm3.so. Looking around a bit on the internets I found the solution: right before build cd into cm/vendor and execute get-prebuilts . This will unpack term.apk and give you the correct library to build against. DO NOT d...

Earlier today I discovered Cinnamon, an alternative desktop environment for those who are not quite happy with Gnome 3. The site contains instructions for installing the two packages necessary for Fedora 16 and Fedora 17. Once installed I found the desktop much more to my liking. In particular it was nice to have something as simple as the off switch on the main menu panel. I was able to find the icon for Chrome and simply drag it to the left panel side. I was also able to add a desktop switcher. Cinnamon is configurable and allows for both a lower and upper panel. I tried this classic layout but discovered that the lower panel was inoperative. I switched it back to the simpler single lower panel.