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.
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.
posted by kittychunk at
5:35 AM
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