Day 32

Neat - I made it. 30+ days with Kubuntu and still going strong.

I still have some minor niggles. The hacks I had to implement for some of the file sharing and network management; the issues with Firefox hogging the CPU and memory; occasional new weirdnesses that pop up now and then and have to be dealt with (by way of example, yesterday I tried to load a page with a Java plugin; ever try and install the JRE in linux? Yeah. Um. Good luck with that).

The eye-opener for me has been that niggles are a way of life when using computers. I've traded one set of niggles (Windows) for another set (Kubuntu). The niggle sets are not quantitatively different enough, however, to distinguish between the OSes based on how much I can get done in a fixed amount of time, on average. Given Kubuntu's free and open source nature, it therefore has a slight advantage, and now that I'm more used to it, it's what I'm going to use as my primary platform. Windows is always going to be around; living and working in a Windows world means every now and then you might just have to boot that partition up to get a critical job done, but I'm comfortable with a model that sees me doing 99% of my work in Kubuntu and an ever declining 1% in That Other OS.

I enjoyed this little adventure. I hope you did too. Try making the change - it's easier than you think ;-)

Day 29

Crikey. Has it nearly been 30 days already? How time flies when you're having fun.

I did promise to myself that when this project started, I would approach it with a total newbie attitude, i.e. no futzing around with coding custom scripts, recompiling of kernels, rummaging around in the trunk of the OS as root, or things of that nature. However, in order to accomplish actual workplace productivity, I've had to crack under the strain ever so slightly.

The Problem: Samba. There is something wrong with my Samba install. It keeps eating part of the smb.conf file every few times Samba is restarted. Since the part that gets eaten specifies workgroup and computer name information as well as user access, this sort of defeats the purpose of "making my laptop look like it used to to everyone on the network" that I was aiming for. I dug around a bit on a few forums and the Samba/Ubuntu bug reports, and came up dry.

The Hack: A simple cat-grep script that runs as root, checking the smb.conf for the important bits and replacing them from a backup smb.conf if they're not there. It's cronned to run every five minutes, although ideally this should really be integrated into the Samba startup script for efficiency.

The Problem: The network manager. Kubuntu's network manager is very neat and pretty - and doesn't work. Well, it works most of the time, but rather erratically. And it might tell you it's working when it's not, and vice versa. It works just fine if you're a desk jockey who boots up their machine in the morning and never unplugs the network cable, but if you're anything like me you're chopping and changing between the wired network and different wireless access points all day. I need a quick, reliable way to switch networks, the way (and it pains me to say this) the WinXP network manager does.

The Hack: I tried a couple alternative graphical network managers for KDE. None of them really satisfied. Going into the control panel -> network -> password-protected admin screen -> change network settings is just too much PT. So I wrote a couple shell scripts to take all the network interfaces down, manually set the gateway and DNS servers, and re-dhcp the one I want up. It's not elegant, but it does the trick, and some hotlinks from the panel menu make it a one-click affair.

The Problem: Backups. See last post.

The Hack: See last post.

On the plus side of things, I made the pleasant discovery that (almost) all of the old electrical simulation software packages I wrote donkey's years ago in Visual Basic run perfectly with Wine. I was dreading having to rewrite them - they're sorely overdue for that anyway, but at least now I can do it at my leisure knowing I can still use the old software if we need it for anything mission critical.

Back to the grindstone... more soon.

Day 23

Nothing new to report, people. Kubuntu's been working nicely for the last week or so with no major showstopping glitches. Or, more accurately, I have found ways to work around its major showstopping glitches and accepted them into my life, much the way I did for Windows' major showstopping glitches.

This morning I decided to try and get my uber N-way backup system up and running again. Back in the dark days of That Other OS, I had a nice double-redundant backup system running. My laptop (let's call it "A"), the manager node of the Linux cluster ("B"), and a USB external hard drive ("C") were the relevant repositories of information.

Primary information on A was backed up to a second hard drive in B via the network.
Primary information on A was backed up to C connected to A.
Primary information on B was backed up to a second hard drive in B.
Primary information on B was backed up to C connected to A, via the network.

Migrating to Kubuntu on the laptop threw a bit of a spanner into the works, mainly because A was the center of operations for all backups, and the software I was using was made for Windows only (boo hiss). Luckily all was resolved with rsync, a clever little app that has been part of *nix since the good old days of the primordial ooze. Rsync copies files, or batches of files, or directories full of files, and so on, while cleverly comparing files for newness and only copying if the source is newer than the destination. This, along with some Samba share entries in fstab which took me several tries to get right, put A right back in the game as the hub around which my private little backup universe revolved.

I now have a little bunch of scripts I can run to do either a full everywhichway backup, or any of a number of partial options. It's not beautiful, y'understand, but it works.

Also - ordered some extra memory for the laptop. Hopefully kicking it up to a gig will improve the Firefox and other issues a little. I'll keep you informed...

Day 15

Ok, so I let the days get away with me a bit there, so sue me. I was on holiday in the mountains. You'd've done the same.

The Kubuntu At Work project is ongoing. After the initial teething troubles were sorted out in the first few days, things have been going fairly smoothly since. There are the odd hiccups, which I'm going to blather about at length, rest assured, but overall, the project is cautiously optimistic to date. Knocking wood. Knocking all the damn wood I can get my fists near.

On getting back from my holiday, I was faced with the first major photo sorting and editing event since switching. I'd managed to pretty much fill my 1GB memory card with pixels, and offloading them onto the laptop (no mean feat – I had to go make coffee while it was chugging away) revealed I'd have my evening's work cut out for me pruning them back, touching up here and there, and selecting a bunch suitable for posting on the web. Firing up digiKam revealed an annoyance I didn't notice the first time around, and haven't had to deal with for quite a while.

It shows fuzzy photos.

This is a resize algorithm issue. Both Windows Picture Viewer and Picasa suffer from the same fault, making nice sharp 3000x2000 pictures from my SLR a blurry mess when viewing them full screen. Back in the Rinderpest I replaced them with FastStone image viewer, which is free and excellent and resizes brilliantly for display, but to my dismay they don't make a Linux version. A quick net search didn't pop up any obvious answers, so I went back and stared at digiKam for a while. Eventually I noticed that if you choose to edit a photo, it fires up a different part of the application, one more suited to modifying images. This part of digiKam scales photos most excellently. A quick fiddle with some keyboard shortcuts enabled easy scrolling through a directory of photos, and one-button delete. All I really need. It's a little slow loading and displaying images, but it's perfectly serviceable for now.

Having edited all the photos, I needed to select a bunch of them and whack them onto the intertubewebs for viewing by you shifty lot out there. At first, I just created a separate HTML directory in my document space, and dumped a copy of the album I wanted to select from into it. Then I popped open digiKam, tried to add the new directory as a new album.

Hmm.

A message pops up - “importing photos from new album”. WTF? It sits there and chugs away for about 10 minutes (I told you I took a hell of a lot of photos – we were in the mountains, the mountains, d'ya hear? Scenery was, like, everywhere) and eventually shows a copy of the folder I'd just copied to the HTML directory, now located in the directory where all my photos are stored (and presumably where digiKam defaults to when feeling the need to run and hide from crazy users). Fearing a big ugly redundant cross-referenced hotlinked mess, I just removed the copy and the album, and moved the HTML folder across into my photos directory, which is probably what I should have done in the first place. All was well, and I could commence preparing the album for the web. Deleting photos went fine. Resizing photos went fine (brownie points for digiKam for having a very flexible and capable batch editor).

Rotating sideways photos also went fine. Or so I thought. Upload the web album, pop on to my site, and all looks ok... at first. Then I notice some of the rotated images aren't rotated. Some of them are, but most of them aren't. Scream a bit. Open digiKam again, and there they all are, in their properly rotated glory. Open Konqueror, and, oh dear, half of the bloody things are sideways again. A bit of netting informs me that it seems there are two ways to rotate a jpg photograph these days. One can either actually rotate the image, i.e. get your processor to crunch on the task of swapping all the pixels around, or one can cop out and set an EXIF tag called “orientation”. Software that respects the “orientation” tag will display the image correctly. Software that doesn't (this is basically everything that isn't a photo management or editing application) won't. Gah! Fortunately once I'd figured this out, digiKam has an easy and obvious menu option saying “reset all EXIF orientation tags” which zeros the stupid things and then allows actual, real image rotation. Re-upload the web album, and it's all good.

Getting back to work after a nice holiday is generally unpleasant, and my return to the salt mine was marred by some interesting events on the laptop. First of all, I finally started coding some modelling software I've been bouncing around in my head for a few months on the cluster. I got quite far along with it, and then had to leave work because it was late, cold, dark, and the janitors were starting to look at me in that “don't you have a life?” way they have. No problem, I thought. Pop a copy of the code across onto the laptop, and head for home, heaters, food, and a comfortable chair to sit in. A bit later, I'm bored with TV, so I fire up the laptop and KDevelop, and work on the code a bit more. All ok so far, until I come to compile. “Can't find stdio.h”, and a whole bunch of other errors. Oh, really, huh? Fairly vital component of C there, fella. A quick Googling reveals I need to install the build-essentials package, which apparently gcc installs without, rendering it pretty freaking useless as a compiler for any kind of real program. Anyway. I do so, and compiling works, woohoo. Now this particular code produces output in the form of a series of POV-Ray render files, which are then executed and the resultant images combined together into a video. These bits are done by a separate script we wrote donkey's years ago; it's a nice viz tool for dynamic problems. Running the script shows me my first problem – no POV-Ray, nggh. Very well. Adept finds the package for me in the Ubuntu repositories, so I don't have to resort to binary installs. Run the script again. POV renders happily, and everything seems to go fine. I try to play the mpg file the script is supposed to produce. No mpg file. Nggh again. ppmtompeg, the app we use to convert a series of POV-rendered pics into a movie, is apparently no longer part of the imageMagick package (which I'd carefully installed earlier knowing we'd need it), but now part of the netpbm (!?) package. Sigh. Fine. Install netpbm, and finally everything works. By now I'm tired, and not even interested in watching the mpg, which says a lot if you know me, and know that the model had to run for nearly an hour to produce the three seconds of video it entailed.

Another thing that annoyed me on back-to-work day was that Firefox seems to have become addled again. Opening more than a few tabs at a time slows the machine to a crawl, and bloody-mindedly opening a few more after that kills it pretty much stone dead. A couple hours of fiddling revealed the culprit – NTLMAPS. Well, either NTLMAPS or the Python interpreter it's using, one of the two. Since they're inseparable, I chose to blame NTLMAPS. It's using some stupid amount of CPU horsepower while loading webpages through FF – one tab hits the CPU up for about 50% of its juice, two and it's at 100%, and more than that and the poor machine is just thrashing hopelessly. Poo sticks. Even more unfortunately, FF still has manky issues with using our ISA proxy directly, so for now I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, and leaving most of my heavy surfing for home.

Finally, in the afternoon I had a free few minutes, so I hauled my machine into the boardroom and hooked it up to our projector for a giggle. The short story here is that Kubuntu is pretty much a dead loss for giving presentations on strange and unfamiliar projectors – don't count on being able to do it. The slightly longer story is that I fiddled for a while with both the ATI control panel (seriously, bleck; it's ten-beers fugly, fix it ATI) and the display manager thingy in the Kubuntu control panel, and neither ever really produced a satisfactory result. The display manager claims to be able to clone display 1 on a nebulously-defined display 2, but it would almost immediately limit me down to 640x480 resolution on both displays whenever I tried it. Painful. Simply leaving everything set as it was after installation and rebooting the machine with the projector connected provided the only moderately reasonable workaround, as the external display would then be woken up (by some PnP action, I suppose) and set to clone the laptop display. Of course, my screen is 1400x1050, and most projectors run at 1024x768, so there was a fair amount of scaling and not-quite-fitting-on-the-screenness going on, but I suppose you could use it for a presentation if you were sensible about leaving reasonable borders at the sides and so on. I need a good fix for this, because a big part of my job is presenting things, but it's not super critical right now. Oh well. Another problem for tomorrow.

A more immediate trouble, and one more to do with a failing of the user rather than the operating system, is that I'm rapidly running out of disk space. My 60GB drive is partitioned 45-15 Windows-Linux, a fact I was abruptly reminded of while trying to plonk some ISOs into my file shares for other people at work. I've got about 2GB of my 15 left, so, well, uh-oh. A couple good photo expeditions, a simulation run or two, and that'll be long gone. I'll probably need to decide sooner rather than later how serious I am about this whole Linux thing, and go with a fresh install plus Kubuntu-friendly partitioning philosophy.