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!
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!
posted by kittychunk at
9:32 AM
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