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.

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!