Day 3

Light! Light at the end of the tunnel! Of course, it may just be a train.

Somewhat less grief with Kubuntu today. Got in, booted up, and the first thing I had to do was fire up Google Earth, which we use in to keep track of all our clients and other such things in a nifty and geekworthy way. GE loads and runs, but it's dog slow and clunky. My former life in Windows-nerdery informs me that this is almost certainly a driver problem, vidcards being rather sensitive to such things. Pop on the forums, and sure enough, Ubuntu ships only the open source ATI driver with the distro (not a surprise). The closed binary driver from ATI themselves is obviously what I want, unfortunately Automatix only has the binary nVidia driver listed. Poop. Ah, but wait - a quick forum search reveals some UbuntuDocs which show how to install the binary for ATI cards from the standard repositories! Brilliant. I follow the instructions, and despite dire warnings of X expiring horribly and never coming back, nothing of the sort happens to me. The drivers behave, X runs, and GE is now smooth as silk. Of course, the binary drivers do cause Beryl to stop functioning, but Beryl was a hell of a system hog and I'm not planning to run it in the near future anyway.

The next thing I had to do was print out some documents, a spreadsheet and a couple of PDFs. Uh oh. I'd forgotten about needing to produce (ugh) hard copy. This could be fun. With some trepidation, I fire up the KDE control panel and select Printers. Add Printer. Network Printer. IP address. Port 9100. Make and model of printer. I actually have the answers for everything it asks me. It asks me intelligent things, and does not ask me what the average fieldmouse population in southern Bolivia during the rainy season is. As a long time user of KDE's occasionally eldritch and unintelligible (but pretty) UI, this comes as something of a surprise. And there I had my Bolivian Fieldmouse Demographics handbook all ready to go. Anyway. To make a short story shorter, installing the printer works. Test pages work. Printing my documents works. An interesting aside though - Acrobat Reader had a lot of trouble displaying PDFs with non-Linux-standard (but system-installed) fonts. Crummy old KPDF did the job of displaying and printing just fine, so I think I'll just be using that; thanks a bunch, Adobe.

Firefox's misbehaviour was next on the hitlist of things that I Really Needed Fixed(tm). I surf a lot as part of my job, so a poorly functioning web browser puts a big dent in my productivity. I fiddled with a few of the obvious network/proxy related options in about:config, none of which changed the stalling-hanging behaviour while running through a proxy server. Bah. Uninstall and reinstall Firefox, wiping all the settings in the .mozilla directory in between - a clean install. I'm still having the same problem. Stumped, I change the proxy setting to point back at the local NTLMAPS proxy as a last ditch test. It fixes the problem! Firefox no longer hangs randomly while surfing, so clearly the issue is a DNS or other communication problem between my machine and the proxy machine. NTLMAPS' response is instant, since it's local, and any lag from the proxy server's side is buffered and doesn't feed back into Firefox. Or something. I'm just blathering happily here because it's working nicely again.

With an optimism born of gross ignorance, and possibly fuelled by a full stomach after lunch, I decided to go for Round 3 with samba. Installed Smb4K and Komba2 to browse the samba network in different ways. Fiddled with them a bit, Smb4K turns out to be a pretty neat app. Unfortunately it's still not telling me anything different - I can only see some of the shared workgroups and machines on the network. I can see more than I could see in Konqueror, but I'm still unable to access any of the ones I can see in Smb4K that aren't visible in Konq. Hair pulling ensues. Then, suddenly, I notice that Smb4K is telling me something interesting - it lists IP addresses in addition to machine names and workgroups. Many of the machines do not have IP addresses listed though - eh? Some quick experimenting shows that a machine's shares are only accessible if the machine's IP address is visible to Smb4K. Hmm. Perhaps this is less a samba problem and more a network problem? Futzed around with the network connection settings a bit, trying to change netmasks and so forth, but had little joy and ended up buggering up my LAN connection quite badly instead. Set everything back to dhcp and rebooted to clean it up. Puzzled for a while. Then for some reason I decided to try entering in the samba address of a network machine manually in Konqueror (eg "smb://192.168.0.10" instead of "smb://joebloggs") . Lord almighty! It works! Knowing this, and the IP addresses of the servers I most commonly use, I rack up a quick list of bookmarks in Konqueror to point to them. Golden. I can even connect to my Cluster manager box without woes. There's still some deeper issue here about why the samba browsers can't see all the boxes on the network, but I've got a practical workaround. I'm a happy camper.

Speaking of camping, your intrepid explorer is off into the bundus for a long weekend. Making The Change will in all hopefulness resume on Monday. Stay tuned.

Day 2

Dammit, this is like detoxing off horse tranquillizers. I used to think I was a Linux geek before this little jaunt, but hell's teeth, there's nothing like a bit of total immersion to dump you way out of your comfort zone, with the weather closing in, and no protection from the elements.

As my buddhist meditation teacher keeps saying, difficult circumstances should be viewed with happiness, as they offer us a chance to practice patience. By that measure, today was especially happy.

Got to work, and at least got connected to the network and got reading my email in fairly short order. Then fired up Firefox and tried to do a bit of surfing, but it started leaking all over the place and the machine rapidly hit its memory ceiling, resulting in karma-destroying clunkiness. A bit of research on the web suggested that Swiftfox (customised, optimised builds of FF on a per-platform basis) might help with these memory issues a bit. Download Swiftfox. Unpack it into my apps directory, and give it a run. All seems to be well, so I uninstall Firefox, update the system tray to point at Swiftfox, and off we go. A little later, while trying to get Google Reader to wake up and smell the coffee, I cleared my cache and cookies. And pretty much everything else too, apparently; particularly, passwords. Swiftfox then threw a crazy wobbly as it tried to connect to our proxy server. Authentication kept failing, resulting in pop-ups asking me for my user/pass every few minutes. Eventually I got fed up and set Swiftfox to point back at the local NTLMAPS proxy. Great. Now I'm getting two boxes popping as soon as I fire the program up, one asking me to auth against our network proxy server, and the other asking me to auth against the local proxy server, which is, unfortunately, impossible. In addition, Swiftfox appears to hang behind these windows, freezing up the rest of the UI in the process. Argh. A reboot and some hair pulling later gets me onto my boss's WiFi network, which thank god is unmanaged and has a broadband connection to the internet plugged into it. I uninstall Swiftfox and reinstall Firefox. Congratulations! You've just wasted half a day!

However, all is still not well with the Firefox installation, which now seems to have caught a milder version (chicken as opposed to small, if you wish) of the pox that affected its thoroughbred sibling. New tabs open clunkily and slowly; the browser often hangs for minutes on end while loading pages; much memory is being monopolised, more even than before. It's not quite dead, just so slow and erratic as to be virtually unusable. I have narrowed it down to a problem with the proxy access - away from work, with a direct connection to the net, it behaves far better. Sigh.

In further fun, I sat down with a determined set to my mind and tried to fix the samba issues. First and foremost, I discovered that my sausage-fingered mangling of smb.conf had resulted in the machine being plonked in a default workgroup, with no access permissions at all. Fixing my error, and reloading samba, did a bizarre thing; it ate the first few lines of my smb.conf. Removing the permissions. Putting me back in the default workgroup. Swine thing! Editing smb.conf again duplicated the error exactly, so it's clearly a bug. Poo sticks. Eventually, the web (oh bless thee, electrons from afar) directed me to a page where some bright spark explained a rather different way of tackling the problem, leaving user-level authentication intact, but bamboozling the server into directing all unknown users to the "nobody" user, which is mercifully passwordless and hence, in a slightly convoluted (but perfectly functional) way, allows everyone else on the network access to my shares. I test it from a Windows machine next door. It works. I practically do a jig.

In more samba experiments, I tried to get the other half of the file-sharing dealio working, namely, me seeing the other shares on the network. Initially, this crashed and burned with a pretty orange flame. I could browse the "samba network" from my "remote places" on the KDE taskbar, I could even see the various workgroups and machines. Trying to open a particular machine to see the shares though, failed with either a time out or a permission-denied. Every now and then I would get asked for my user/pass (for the Windows domain) and after supplying it, would still be politely told not to let the door hit my ass on my way out. Eventually I found a handy setting in the share config part of the KDE control panel that let me specify a common user/pass for accessing Windows shares. Plugged in my details, and voila, we're good to go. Access to the network is mine! Ah but wait, there's more. First of all, there is a minor niggle in that the user/pass I use to access the cluster computer in my office (it's also a Linux box, or boxes, rather) is different to my domain pair. This, along with the now-automated means of logging in to all the other shares on the network, means I can't get onto that box, which is pretty important for backups and suchlike. Bah, maybe I can fix this later with NFS or something. The next thing that happens is straight out of the bizarro-files. After fiddling with the samba server as described above, I pop on to "remote places" again, only to find that half of the workgroups are now AWOL. Refreshing the page seems to bring up random ones, but never the whole list, and never the one or two that contain virtually all the machines on the network. I'm confused; will have to investigate more tomorrow.

Luckily the day ended on a good note - plugged in my D50, which was automatically recognised as a digital camera and plonked on my desktop. A simple double click got me into the memory card and a quick drag and drop sorted out storage of photos. digiKam already knows what directory to look in for my pictures, and sorts out and displays the new ones just fine. Rotate a couple, skim through on the slide show dumping the bad ones (I'm a dreadful photographer, so an easy delete-from-preview shortcut is essential - clever digiKam just uses the delete button, like everyone else), and I'm pretty much done. A total breeze.

Ok, that's it. Turning the computer off now.

Day 1

Gah! Well, I suppose I always knew it was going to be bad ;)

My first woe after arriving at work was getting the laptop on the network. This wasn't too hard, after I figured out that Kubuntu was for some odd reason not DHCPing properly. I had to manually specify the gateway server before anything would behave. Voila! An IP address.

Next, I tried Thunderbird. Oh dear. Errors and mess. After some fiddling, it became apparent that it wasn't connecting to my local POP3 server on the LAN, despite all the settings being correct. Giving it the IP address of said server instead of the name cured the problem; a DNS issue perhaps. Then, after about a trillion user/pass entries, Tbird started throwing its toys about sending (but oddly, not receiving) mail. Pulling of hair. Eventually I discovered that this was because I had forgotten to make some of the files the mailboxes pointed at writeable. I then had fun with profiles, thinking I could blithely copy my Windows Tbird profile over to Linux. According to the interwebs, you can do this. It didn't work for me, so I had to create a fresh new profile for the Linux install. No biggie, except that a lot of my nice rules and trained spam filter now need to be set up again.

Ah yes, a minor victory. I found the Tbird icon lurking in the Tbird install folder (hmm, big surprise there), and so my system tray icon now looks the way it should. Hurrah!

Trying to forward some work correspondence alerted me to something else I'd forgotten - my address book, painstakingly constructed out of Outlook via the Exchange directory many moons ago. Copied abook.mab from the old Tbird profile on the XP partition. Can't find any contacts. Search the net, re-read the instructions, then notice a different mab file lurking in the same profile. Copy it over to Linux and rename it to abook.mab, and contacts appear out of the mist almost totally not the way gorillas would.

With Tbird more or less beaten into submission, I moved on to file sharing. Samba, the foolish thing, misbehaves. At first it made the machine visible on our network, and all looked hunky dory until one came to access the shared folder I'd set up. Permission denied from any other Windows machine on the network. I then followed some instructions as to how to enable authenticationless share access for LANs, which involved some mangling of the smb.conf. Now Samba's totally borked and won't even show the machine on the network list. At this point I got sick of it. Tomorrow's problem.

Needing a break, I decided to get web-browsing up and running so I could get my daily fix. This wasn't too bad, although my original plan of using NTLMAPS as a local proxy for Firefox crashed and burned along with NTLMAPS (more on this later). Luckily Firefox can do its own in-browser authentication against NTLM proxies, so I just pointed it at our proxy server and (again, after entering in user/pass more times than any human being should ever have to do) all was well. Well, "well-ish". The speed of surfing was horrible, although I'm not clear whether this was just our terrible line at work or some deeper Linux issue.

NTLMAPS exploded and died when I first tried to run it. The problem was postponed for a while after getting Firefox working, but I realised I had to make a better effort since NTLMAPS is about the only way you can get other apps that need internet access out through a Microsoft proxy. Most particularly and pressingly, Adept. Some perusal of the forums led me to believe that the ntlmaps package needed a reconfigure to correctly pick up various settings. This it did, although I battled for a good hour trying to get Adept to connect to the net and fetch updates. Eventually, after much moving, renaming, chmodding, uninstalling, reinstalling fun, I realised that I'd transposed two of the digits in the listen port in the server.cfg used by NTLMAPS. What's that line about the universe inventing a better idiot? Sigh. Fixed the port number, and Adept works.

Opening some email and documents rapidly reminded me of one of Linux's ongoing woes - fonts. I watch in morbid horror as OpenOffice mangles an MOU document by trying to turn Arial into something it thought was Arial but wasn't. A quick googling revealed the existence of the msttcorefonts package, a nifty little package with the common ones used in virtually all Windows documents (Arial, Times New Roman, and a dozen or so others). Install, restart all my apps, and we're golden.

This took most of the day - I'm pooped. But I have to mention a couple annoyances that have just cropped up. Firstly, memory. Ugh. Kubuntu with Firefox and Tbird and nothing else running easily soaks up all 512MB of my memory and a little bit of swap space to boot.

Crikey.

Secondly, something odd has happened with Google Reader. Firing the site up just results in a "Loading..." bubble that sits there forever. This seems to be a problem on the laptop side, since it's happening on two different internet connections. Odd.

Tomorrow - more adventures!

Day 0

With Kubuntu 7.04 on the (metaphorical) shelves, I've run out of both excuses and time. It got installed on the laptop this weekend, and tomorrow, I take it to work.

And use it.

I've tried to pre-empt as much of the pain as I can by installing goodies I know will be necessary, and setting up the preinstalled ones in intelligent (my word; others might use "stupid") ways. A short and probably incomplete (it's late) list reads:

• Installed Firefox (2.0.0.3), bookmarked my del.icio.us and Google Reader pages. Visited a couple of pages and installed all the missing plugins I could find.
  
• Installed Thunderbird (manually, since the 7.04 repositories missed 2.0.0.0 being released by about a day; nnngh), set up work and GMail pop accounts, copied mailboxes from XP partition to local dir, aimed Tbird at them. Couldn't get the Tbird icon on the panel menu to look like the Tbird icon. Found a default emaily icon from KDE's set instead. Bah.
• Created a "My Documents" in the home dir. Copied some of my work and day-to-day junk across from the XP partition. Kubuntu at least automounts that partition whenever it boots, so it's there if I need to get at it.
  
• Set up Kopete to talk to my GTalk IM account. Messed around with some formatting and layout until it fairly closely resembled the GTalk client. Kopete-Pidgin interactions seem to generate spurious amounts of whitespace for the Pidgin user, although Kopete-anything else seems to be fine.
  
• Installed Automatix2 (oh thank god for Automatix). Used it to install a bunch of audio and video codecs, VLC media player, WINE, Acrobat, Google Earth, and Picasa. Google Earth installer made a dog's breakfast of my home directory because I wasn't paying attention when it asked me what files it should be putting where. Poop. At least it runs; I'll fix it later.
  
• Installed NTLMAPS. This'll be needed at work. More tomorrow.
• Installed Samba client/server. Ditto. Ditto.
  
• Foobed around with several file managers (Dolphin, Konqueror, and some ghastly other one whose name I can't even remember any more). Konqueror was the most clunky to set up, but seems the best laid-out and most useful when done. Created a shortcut to launch it with a modified file management profile, and dumped the others.
• Installed Beryl, just for kicks. Turned it on. Ogled the eye candy. Turned it off again, when it became clear it was flattening my system like a big fat man jumping off the Empire State building.
  
• Pointed amaroK at my MP3 collection on the XP partition, which worked magnificently (even downloaded album art automatically; take that, iTunes). Tried to get it to play nicely with my iPod Nano. Pain. More on this tomorrow, or whenever I have free time to resume banging my head against a brick wall.

That's it for now; I'm going to bed. Tomorrow the fun starts.