I said something about the raw power of Linux in the terminal.  I spoke too soon when dealing with Xubuntu.  It might lack the shinier wrapper of GNOME (let’s not start bashing KDE, it is late), but command line tools are not its strong suit.  I tried searching for a quick and dirty alternative to the livecd-iso-to-disk script I have grown to love on Fedora.  I was sick of looking for something without a GUI, so I just used usb-creator.  To be honest, I tried.

First, I downloaded the restore DVD image, which took a long time to find.  Ironically enough, you can find it here on SourceForge.  You can also just do this if you have wget, which you should.

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/eeecommunity/L701_EN_1.0.6.6.iso

Keep in mind the name might change once a newer DVD restore image comes out.  Considering how crappy Xandros is, and that the image is over a year old as of the date of this post, I would not expect any bleeding edge updates.  Then, I tried usb-creator.  Boy, how much fun it was.  If anyone else considered this method, they found a cute error that killed their dreams quickly.

Another fun, yet ironic, moment in the *nix universe.

So, I quickly crossed that method of the list.  Then I tried the other GUI alternative I though would work, UNetbootin.  I thought that worked, because it did everything it intended to do.  The problem was that it never removed all the Eeedora live install files and configuration.  So, it did seemingly little good.  This was before I RTFM, another priceless revelation, revealed for the hundredth time.

So, I finally went to the EeePC wiki and read the article on making a restore usb from the DVD image.  Now I saw the whining about the capacity of the flash drive needed was two gigs at minimum, but that does not seem to be what caused the errors later on.  The Gizmo! Overdrive did perfectly well with only 1GB.  The internal SSD on the Surf 2G was not so cooperative.  The instructions left a little bit to the imagination, so I will be explicit (assuming your usb disk is on the /dev/sdb device node):

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/eeecommunity/L701_EN_1.0.6.6.iso # if you did not already

sudo umount /dev/sdb* # unmount all the usb partitions

sudo /sbin/fdisk /dev/sdb # please make sure this is the right node, do not wipe your main disk and bork your computer

Command (m for help): d # delete the partition, may have to do this for each partition on the usb

Command (m for help): n # create a new partition

Command action

e     extended

p     primary partition (1-4)

p

Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): t

Selected partition 1

Hex code (type L to list codes): 6 # set partition type to FAT16

Command (m for help): a # make the parition bootable

Paritition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): w # write all the changes to disk

Command (m for help): q # and finally quit

sudo /sbin/mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n eeepc -v /dev/sdb1 # make a FAT16 partition on the /dev/sdb1 node with the name eeepc

sudo mkdir /media/iso # make a directory for the loopback iso mount

sudo mount -o loop /path/to/iso/L701_EN_1.0.6.6.iso /media/iso # loopback mount the DVD image

cp /media/iso/boot/usb.img.gz ~/ # copy the bootloader for the usb drive

cd ~/; gunzip usb.img.gz # unzip the bootloader

sudo dd if=usb.img of=/dev/sdb # write the bootloader to the usb device, NOT the 1st partition

sudo cp -v P701L.gz 2007.10.07_04.33.bld blockcount.dat user_start.dat /media/EEEPC # ver.tag, mentioned in the docs, is not there; does not seem to matter; booted anyway

sudo umount /dev/sdb*; sudo umount /media/iso # and your done!

So, after all this, the flash booted.  I even gave it the final blessing and told it to reinstall Xandros, despite the strong protests by my inner child.  Fortunately, I received the final errors upon completion:

Trying disk sdb. . .

Trying disk sdc. . .

Found EEEPC image on Gizmo! overdrive [/dev/sdc]. . .

Ready to image Eee PC using build 2008.03.04_22.42.

Enter “yes” to continue, anything else to reboot.

yes

Installing from USB image (Estimated time required 5 minutes).

Expect to write 75305 records of 32k. . .

dd: /dev/sda: No space left on device

Done. . . Creating user partition. . .

Done. . . Formatting user partition. . .

mount: Mounting proc on /mnt/proc failed: Not a directory

mke2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)

Could not stat /dev/sda2 — Permission denied

tune2fs: Permission denied while trying to open /dev/sda2

Couldn’t find valid superblock.

mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 March 2005)

/dev/sda3: Permission denied

umount: Couldn’t umount /mnt/proc: Invalid argument

Ready. . . Press ENTER to reboot

Requesting system reboot. . .

And the best part, after all this, is the super descriptive error that ensued when the post-install boot completed.

Error 17

Well, it looks like I am waiting to get the DVD when I go home.  God damn the idiot Asus engineers!  I install Wubi in seconds, and they cannot even make a decent install disk with any useful tools to fix their wonderful error messages.  It more or less means, according to these results, that I am screwed.

And thus concludes another rant.  Enjoy your day!

The Windows UBuntu Installer, aka Linux for chumps.

I must say, I thought I had fallen out of love with Ubuntu Linux distros a long, long time ago.  Despite my curmudegeony love for the simplicity of Fedora distros, I just started playing with Wubi on a work computer because I wanted to quickly format a USB drive. I used to think this was easy in Windows, but I found out it is so much easier in Linux with all the nifty CLI utilities.  After 10 minutes, I am so shocked at how slick Xubuntu is on my computer with a one-click Windows installer.  I really appreciate not needing to mod my work laptop too much, and with anything more complicated than installing OpenOffice.org.  I definitely will make this the “it app” at the water cooler.  This is ascreenshot from a Lenovo Thinkpad T400.

What you see is what you get.

I was fortunate enough to stumble upon some IBM DeveloperWorks documentation on a fairly recent kernel addition, i-notify.  I-notify is very, very cool.  It allows for someone to monitor file system events.  The problem is that I thought I would need a lot more code (in C, of all languages) to do something useful, say, monitor when the kernel loads a driver module for USB audio devices.  Sounds relevant, no?  Boy, was I wrong.

Somehow, I had foolishly believed that this code could lie around for years without someone making a toolset in Linux.  Further research brought me to the inotify-tools website, which mentioned how it is conveniently packaged as a RPM file for me in the Fedora Extras repository.  So, I installed it.

sudo yum -y install inotify-tools

With a toolset already coded for me, this changed from a programming problem to a simple scripting problem.  I was having some trouble, but that was because I have never scripted bash before.  I stumbled upon this post on LinuxQuestions.org, and it guided me in the right direction.  So, I drafted this little script here, and saved it under the clever name unmute.

unmute

#!/bin/bash
# Use the inotify-tools toolset to run command to unmute
# mic and raise volume if it detects the proper driver.

kmod=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/sound/usb/snd-usb-audio.ko

inotifywait -q –monitor –format %e -e open $kmod | while read event; \
do sleep 5 && amixer -q -c 2 sset Mic 200% cap unmute; \
done

The fun doesn’t stop there.  Now, we need to make sure that the script is active on startup.  So, make the script executable and move it to a directory in your $PATH environment variable.

chmod +x unmute

mv unmute /usr/bin

And last but not least, we must add the script to the rc.local (located at /etc/rc.local) file to ensure that it loads when the computer boots up.  Make sure you add the line in bold with the necessary admin privileges.  Keep in mind your rc.local file might look different.

/etc/rc.local

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don’t
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

unmute &

touch /var/lock/subsys/local

And voila!  Now your computer, if it has Fedora 9 with necessary libraries and it uses snd-usb-audio kernel module for your headset as it should, will automatically unmute the USB headset and set the volume to max.  Let me know if you have problems.

sudo yum install fuse-devel gcc-c++ gnome-keyring-manager make pkgconfig nss-pkcs11-devel wget wxGTK-devel;tar -xvzf TrueCrypt 6.1a Source.tar.gz;cd truecrypt-6.1a-source;wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11.h;wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11f.h;wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11t.h;make;sudo cp Main/truecrypt /bin/

I decided I need TrueCrypt to store some personal documents that I do not want people find (tax forms, employment information, etc).  Unfortunately, the bastards who make TrueCrypt make an rpm for only one Redhat-based distribution, OpenSUSE, and have very strict license rules about repackaging and/or modifying their code.  As much as I want to spend time complaining about their preferred choice of distro, I shall not.  What I will do is give a brief summation of how to compile TrueCrypt 6.1a on Fedora 9.

First of all, I want to point out you should always read the manual (as the title politely hints at).  I always think I am “above” this step, and I always learn my lesson.  I read this tutorial, but I still had problems.  Just in case you were wondering, these are the requirements listed in the README page bundled with 6.1a’s source:

Requirements for Building TrueCrypt for Linux and Mac OS X:
———————————————————–

- GNU Make
- GNU C++ Compiler 4.0 or compatible
- Apple XCode (Mac OS X only)
- pkg-config
- wxWidgets 2.8 shared library and header files installed or
wxWidgets 2.8 library source code (available at http://www.wxwidgets.org)
- FUSE library and header files (available at http://fuse.sourceforge.net
and http://code.google.com/p/macfuse)
- RSA Security Inc. PKCS #11 Cryptographic Token Interface (Cryptoki) 2.20
header files (available at ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20)
located in a standard include path or in a directory defined by the
environment variable ‘PKCS11_INC’.

If I had read these, I would not have the problems I eventually encountered.

The first time I compiled, I downloaded the wxGTK 2.8.10 library source from the project’s website as the tutorial suggested, but I had compilation errors complaining about missing constants, clearly for the wxGTK library.  So, I decided to use the RPM provided by yum instead the second time around.

The second time I received compilation errors since because I was missing the RSA PKCS-11 header files.  If I had read the README file prior to compilation and Googling, I would not have embarassed myself.  So, without further ado, here are the quick and easy steps I used to compiled TrueCrypt 6.1a on Fedora 9.

1. Download the TrueCrypt source from here.
2. Open up a terminal, and open up the directory containing the TAR file of TrueCrypt’s source.
3. Input the following commands:

sudo yum install fuse-devel gcc-c++ gnome-keyring-manager make pkgconfig nss-pkcs11-devel wget wxGTK-devel

tar -xvzf TrueCrypt 6.1a Source.tar.gz

cd truecrypt-6.1a-source

wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11.h

wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11f.h

wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11t.h

make

sudo cp Main/truecrypt /bin/

So, about these commands.  I tried using yum as suggested in Januz’s more recent tutorial to use RPM’s instead of having to directly download the PKCS-11 header files, but to no avail.  That is why I download the header files using wget.  I also suggest installing gnome-keyring-manager with the expectation you will eventually have to manage your keys (for TrueCrypt, or even for your wireless networks).  Let me know if this worked well for any of you.

sudo yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio

I won’t be missing that anytime soon.  Now that I have ALSA all to myself, I think it is time to learn how to mute and unmute devices from the CLI, instead of using the gnome-volume-control.  I stumbled upon amixer during my Googling, which is not to be confused with the more graphical, but less useful, alsamixer.  It is not part of the base Fedora 9 install, so you need to install it first:

sudo yum install amixer

Then you ought to play with the alsamixer command and inspect your current configuration, so you can determine which “card” (audio device) you want to configure from the command line.  So, try each “card” until you discover which one is the capture device of your choosing.  For me, it is my USB headset.  Use the following command, where you should replace N with 0, then increment until you find what you are looking for:

alsamixer -c N

I discovered that my USB headset is card 2 (the sound devices on my nVidia motherboard is card 0 and its modem is card 1).  You will know which one is correct by the name of the device in the upper lefthand corner.  For me, it was USB Device 0xd8c:0x0c, the same as it was in the gnome-volume-control applet.  See the screenshot below if you do not follow me.

Alsamixer running while I configure my USB headset.

Once you know that, it is a piece of cake.  First, determine the name of the capture device for the card:

amixer -c 2

This will give you output resembling this (I am not sure how much it will vary depending on hardware):

Simple mixer control ‘Mic’,0
Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined cvolume pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-joined
Playback channels: Mono
Capture channels: Mono
Limits: Playback 0 – 32 Capture 0 – 16
Mono: Playback 0 [0%] [0.00dB] [off] Capture 0 [0%] [0.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control ‘Auto Gain Control’,0
Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
Playback channels: Mono
Mono: Playback [on]
Simple mixer control ‘Speaker’,0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
Playback channels: Front Left – Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 – 151
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 114 [75%] [-7.85dB] [on]
Front Right: Playback 114 [75%] [-7.85dB] [on]

For my laptop, the capture device is cleverly named ‘Mic.’  So, to mute the microphone and set the volume to 0%, the command is:

amixer -c 2 sset Mic 0% cap mute

To unmute the microphone and set the volume to 100%, the command is:

amixer -c 2 sset Mic 100% cap unmute

It’s as simple as that.  Soon, I hope to find a way to run this command as soon as the driver loads.  I imagine this will require some sort of bash scripting.  I will write up something here when I have a solution.

Sorry, no ladies and no gentleman.  I have been away for a long period.  Iwas a little too burnt out at the time to write up some recent developments.  As you can tell, I have returned.

For a period, I really wanted to get a bluetooth USB dongle to and use a bluetooth headset with Skype.  Unfortunately, dear readers (probably reader), I am too cheap to shop anywhere else other than Best Buy.  I was forced to choose the Rocketfish Bluetooth USB dongle.  For lack of a better word, it was a total piece of junk.  It registers as a Human Interface Device (e.g. USB dongle for linking up wireless keyboards and mice), which infuriated me.  If I recall correctly, I used modprobe and eventually had it load as an HCI device (a Bluetooth device in Linux kernel speak).  Unfortunately, it would fault pretty quickly, and I never was able to connect my phone, a Sony Ericsson w580i, or the headset I bought from Best Buy, a Plantronic Bluetooth Headset.  A word comes to mind: pipedream.  I have no idea what I was thinking.  Afer a week or two of fiddling around, I returned those pieces of crap.  I had had enough with poorly implemented piece of trash.  In the meantime, I quickly searched Google on my cell as I found a cheap, generic USB headset at Best Buy, I found a blog that spoke favorable of the Dynex USB headset and how Linux quickly recognized it out of the box.  I did have several minor issues (as alluded to in the title, barely worthy of a headache in my mind), that I felt I ought to recout.

When the USB headset driver is loaded (you will know if it is successful, the Fedora welcome tone is played when it is finished), the mic is muted by default.  It did not occur to me for a long time, as I went directly to configuring it in Skype, that the microphone needed to  be turned on.  This oversight grealy prolonged the time needed to get this device running out of the box.  I tried to find out if I could stop this when the driver loaded.  I will update this if I ever figure out how.  The not so automated way to fix this goes as follows:

1. Press Alt+F2 and input gnome-volume-control or open it with a shortcut.
2. This will bring you to a window similar to the first screenshot below.  Open the menu and select the USB Device 0xd8c:0x0c (Alsa Mixer). The 0x???:ox?? value will vary depending on the brand and model of USB headset.
3. Click the mute/unmute icon at the bottom of the left pane (see the third screenshot).
4. Adjust the volume control and raise it all the way, making your window match the final screenshot.
5. Close the application and enjoy audio capture via USB.

And that’s it.  Now the USB headset works in Skype.  When I find a way to automate this silly procedure, I will write a post about it.

PEBKAVM: The problem is not always you.

Good evening, boys and girls.  Today is another installment of my annoyances with VM software (VMWare mostly) on my Linux box at work.  In a perfect world, it would not be necessary.  The unfortunate reality is that I need to use Windows XP.  I have alluded to this bane of my existence issue several times before, so I will spare you a rant.

So, now that I have transitioned to VMWare Server, I have been experiencing an occasional keyboard problem.  I originally believed it was a case of PEBKAC.  Sadly, I found out it is not.  I would be typing on my guest Windows XP Professional image on my Fedora Core 10 host.  At random times, the host started to have issues.  I could only type in a style most accustomed to teenagers on Fedora.  The ALT key, the CTRL key, the Shift key, and just anything except basic alphanumeric keys failed to register anything.  Of course, the keyboard was working perfectly in the guest VM.  Thank God I searched Google out of frustration about this infuriating exotic error.  It turns out the error was PEBKAVM, or rather Problem Exists Between Keyboard and VM.  Thankfully, quickly resetting the X keyboard map, described here and in other locations on the intarwebs, fixed the issue.  Just run this command:

[ajs67@localhost ~]$ setxkbmap

That solved the problem for me.  For others it appears to be more severe.  Thanks again, VMWare, for making the seemingly simple completely unbearable.

As some of you might have guessed, I do not like running Windows XP Professional on my office workstation like the rest of the IT drones.  I need to be different, quenching my unbridled need for attention and an unconquerable desire to appear more technically savvy than my co-workers.  I nonetheless need to use Windows (the university I work for is most obviously a Microsoft shop, like the rest of them).   I had converted a dual boot machine into a dual boot machine that can mount a physical NTFS partition as a VM (a big thanks to Imran Nazar for his instructions here).  That was interesting, but I realized the workstation I use has SATA drives on a RAID set to legacy mode. Imran’s instructions (and that of VMWare) recommend people doing this only with IDE drives for reasons above my technical knowledge.  This led me to VirtualBox for a while.  If I remember, you could use a couple workarounds, but I did not want to invest the effort in reading VMWare’s lengthy documentation on the topic.

I had a good go with VirtualBox.  Sadly, I did not use OSE (the Open Source Edition).  I really needed the command line tools to convert the rawdisk (the NTFS partition) into the correct image file.  Obviously, those tools, arguably the only real gem in the VirtualBox toolkit, were only in the proprietary version.  The problem was that the performance was, how can you say, piss poor.  I did not want to expend the effort to figure out why this was exactly.  I tried increasing the memory, including the video memory, but I could not speed up the Windows GUI rendering.  Every time I opened a menu, it was painfully slow.  I actually saw it render from nothing, to a greyish shadow, to a premonition of a Start Menu.  Finally, the Start Menu would manifest itself 30 seconds after I wanted it.  So, I decided if I was going to be using a proprietary blob, it best be VMWare.  At least they had sufficient performance.  Also, VirtualBox had really annoying disk permission and user privilege issues that required constant tinkering as I moved things around often in this testing phase.  I know there solution was more Unix-like, but it constantly annoyed me.  I am sorry VirtualBox, but I will try tinkering with you again when I have time.

So, I nuked the physical partition (nothing of value had been installed on it yet) and opted for a classic VM for easy backup (translation: copying and pasting the directory) and to have more space.  I played with VMWare Workstation, but I was sick of being reminded of the impending time bomb that would reign hell fire upon me after a month.  Then, like a good piece of shitty trialware, it would demand I pay my dues (at the time of this writing, 189.00 USD).  I am not inclined to pay that much for software I need just to run more software I hate, so I looked for something I could use that was better than VMWare Player.  I want to be able to create VM’s after all.  Then, it came to me.  I totally forgot about the free VMWare Server 2 product.

I quickly realized why I had forgot it.  It is a huge pain in the ass.  I had accidentally downloaded the second version, which is a plague of locusts on the virtualization community.  I know it is a free product, and it is only meant to encourage those interested in VMWare to upgrade to their more serious ESXi product, but a web interface!?  You want to advertise your products as a platform for concurrently running operating systems in realtime, and you actually think someone can control that with a shitty web interface?  I am not a real developer by any stretch, VMWare, but you have to be kidding me.  Needless to say, I downgraded to VMWare Server 1.0.7 (if I remember correctly).  Fortunately, I was receiving some really annoying compiler errors after installing the RPM and running vmware-config.pl.  All hope was lost.  Or was it?

Kang released a patch that adjusted all the calls VMWare kernel module was making to deprecated features.  Sadly, VMWare kernel developers are not in touch with the one thing they need to know, the Linux kernel.  Once I applied the patch, the VMWare kernel module compiled perfect.  I then downloaded and compiled the console addition, and voila.  Another exciting end to an exciting day.

Kang, I do not know you well (or even at all), but you are my hero.

Glimpse of a NewsGator website screenshot.Glimpse of a NetNewsWire screenshot.

I have been bouncing between jobs, keeping me sufficiently busy and out of the blogosphere.  Fortunately for me, moving to my current job landed me in a week with a fancy Apple MacBook, a far cry from my old junky iBook G4 (which is crumbling due to mistreatment and now misuse).  This all came about because I asked the IT guy at my office to hook me up with Leopard (more on that later when I find things that frustrate me).  Since I have been increasingly whoring myself out to the Apple fanboys, I felt a need to test the merchandise.  One item on the agenda was finding a solid application to read my favorite RSS feeds.

Glimpse of a NetNewsWire screenshot.

For my current job, I spend a lot of time reading them.  I, therefore, am very picky about what I am looking for.  I wanted something easy on the eyes, and more importantly, an application that syncs with a web version when I am not near a computer I own.  I would have stuck with Google Reader, but I did not find it so easy to forward the feeds collected to another application (let’s say for the sake of argument, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0).  Some people fought it out on a Ubuntu forum, saying that the feed icon I saw in Firefox would direct me to a feed of all the RSS feed posts I had in my account.  They were clearly wrong, and so I was pissed.  I tried a few solutions very briefly (and I mean speedy 10 minutes assessments of a few Google searches), and nothing appealed to me.  It was not until I checked out the NewsGator website, and their product NetNewsWire for Mac OS X (both 10.4 and 10.5), was I reasonably pleased with a synced RSS reading experience.

If it is not obvious to the masses, I hate proprietary software.  That is right, I am unabashed FOSS slut.  No one would expect that from someone who lusts for *nix platforms like me, right?  That being said, I really like this application, I am forced to deal with this something closed source until I find a competitor who can match or surpass them.

First of all, the possible themes range from edgy and stylish to easy on the eye (which I need, and I will explain later).  Moreover, you can upload your own stylsheets for your viewing pleasure.  I am not sure if someone is actively developing these, or the community is just sending them in like hot cakes.  I clearly have not a clue.

Secondly, it appears to handle more obscure encodings.  I digest a great deal of Arabic content, and few applications get this right.  I did find standard application bundles (Thunderbird) and web applications (Google Reader) that had managed to get the job done, but syncing was a deal breaker.  Also, Arabic 12 point font is relatively smaller than 12 point English, German, French, what have you.  I have no idea why, but this has been a constant problem for me.  I screwed around with Thunderbird for a while, but I could not hack it for some reason to make the the subject header to be bigger (help would be appreciated if anyone has a clue).  I clearly did not understand how to do it for anything, because changing the fonts only changed certain text elements (I love Thunderbird, but my understanding of the Settings Menu and the hackerish Config Editor is far from perfect).  Thus, having adjustable themes that handle these encodings, and allows me to see them with wrecking my vision, is a huge advantage for me.

Thirdly, organization is very nice.  Like the cornucopia of RSS readers, I can arrange different feeds, so you do not have to look at all your favorite bitstops (cute, no?) all at once.  If you have to read plenty of them for work and pleasure, this becomes tedious, believe me.

Finally, there is the syncing.  I own many computers, and use many for work-related purposes.  What happens if I do not feel like uploading a new OPML file every time I switch computers for a day or so, but not permanently?  Well, I use their “trendy” (believe me, I am kidding here) interface.  I really wanted to do this with Google Reader and Thunderbird, but there was no good option.  RSS Mixer is something some have been talking about work, but it is not as feature-rich as one would hope.  So, I am stuck with this.

And now, after all the teasing, here are full screenshots you all deserve.

NetNewsWire Screenshot

NewsGator Website Screenshot