New ubuntu

The jaunty jackalop. :-). I cant wait!!!!!! There is a lot of angry people who feel that conicals 6 month release cycle forces them to push the product with bugs and broken packages, but keep in mind this is a community, if we don't see the code we cant help fix it!!!! If your a user who just need it to work, stick with what's working until its safe to move to the next release and the big problems have been fixed/addressed. My friend Dave has been on gutsy for a while now, we are just starting to look at an upgrade to hardy heron. At first there were concerns about new Linux headers not working with virtual box and alsa sound driver issues (that I must say were addressed pretty quickly by the community and conical). But we have tested and researched potential problems and feel it safe to move forward. I will keep you updated on the process of the upgrade.

Citrix install

Ok so I recently installed Citrix client on my Ubuntu hardy heron box. I downloaded the tar.gz from the Citrix site and ran the install script. I went to launch citrix , which by the way put icons in my app > internet menu :-), and it didn't launch........ Wtf..... I navigated to. /usr/lib/ICAClient and ran citrix connection manager, it told me I was missing something, ibmotiff3 I apt-get install the missing package and we were up and running, when I attempted to launch a program on a citrix app server (note desktop worked fine). I received an error message about not having access to. /home/user/.ICAClient/??.ini. So I ran terminal and can chmod 777 ??.ini. And launched the citrix app again.... We have joy!!! My citrix was running as expected.... Turn out when I installed citrix I did it as root. Buy running script with the sudo..... This was were I went wrong, the folders created in my home folder belonged to root, not me.... Oooppppss!!! But now I know better for next time. Any. My friend David also runs ubuntu 7.10 gutsy. He was trying to launch citrix web apps from his schools online lab site, he was getting an error about Equifax certificate... After looking around for a bit and making sure fire fox had this cert enabled and installed I got frustrated and ran to Google for some answers , I found on the ubuntu forums that. Citrix holds its own cert in the /lib/usr/icaclients folder...so I checked and didn't see an Equifax cert file..... Hmmm what to do..... Back 2 Google I go.... After a few min. Of searching I found the Equifax site and it was hosting a bunch of cert files. I needed the Equifax ca cert file, I downloaded them and moved them the proper folder under /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/Equifax_Secure_Certificate_Authority.crt. I think.... After that I Re-launched the citrix app page. And. Ohhh joy, it worked..... It felt good, like I am really starting to understand an intelligently resolve issues with Linux. ..... And now Dave can do his skewl work on his laptop, further decreasing his need for a windows so .... Next step for him is getting ms office 07 installed under wineHopefully my next post will be about how I solved a problem with running an app called virtual do for my friend Denver, it installs under wine, but is slow and the audio is choppy, I had the same problems with fl studio for myself and some tweaking of the audio driver settings resolved most of the issues... I plan on tackling the virtual dj issue sometime this week. Hopefully I can report back with some positive result.

Drivers!!!!

Damn! For the second time in 1 month I have had the hardest time installing drivers in windows xp!!! Earlier this month I "downgraded" a laptop for my gf's cuz from vista to xp. I installed xp and slipstreamed sp3 with the install and went to install drivers after that, aside from the ati radeon xpress 200m needing to be manually installed with a modified INF file. I had one heck of a time installing the modem and sound drivers. I need the ms uaa bus for hd audio driver installed first, kb888111 I think, but in sp3 it would not install, turns out I had to extract the compressed. Kb*.exe. And. Install the uaa driver manually. Then install sound and modem drivers. 7 hours of hair pulling fun that was to figure out, thank goodness for Google. Any way it’s all working now. Now tonight was another driver issue. With xp sp2 and a sprint 597 compass USB air card. Apparently. The install crashed/died half way. Some components were setup, others were not and still sitting in unknown devices. My co worker Jackson (props to Jackson) was working on it and he was there late, so I grabbed the laptop from him to see if I could help( he seemed frustrated after several hours of trying to get the card to install and was threatening harm against the laptop). I took the laptop and removed all drivers/software related to the card, and tried a fresh install of the driver (they install auto from a storage onboard the air card). Every time the msi installer would fail and the drivers would not be setup. After about 1 hour of this I figured id take the manual approach. After search trough the files extracted from the msi (that failed every time!). I found a folder with drivers for the air card. Io manually pointed every unknown device to this folder and let it select the best driver...... Viola... All the drivers for the air card began to install. But it took. 3 -4 hours and 2 techs to get it going..... Wow..... And people bitch about drivers on Linux!!! - could be that I am just an idiot and made something very easy into something very difficult...... But. Jackson def. knows what he doing so go figure.

Yellow dog linux

Well, I have been researching a lot of Linux distro's for my ps3 . I have decided to go with yellow dog. There is support for cell processor built in to the distro which is nice. There also seems to be a lot of support forums for it incase there are problems. I was very upset to find out that there are no NVIDIA drivers available for the NVIDIA gpu in the ps3. Sony allows you to tinker and install your own os, but I guess they want you to use their os for playing games. From what I understand all is not lost because when you take advantage of the cell processors in the ps3 it is possible to get somewhat decent graphic performance even without the gpu. Don't expect to play cod4. But compiz should run ok with some conservative settings =). Hopefully someone will find a way to access the NVIDIA gpu and we can really have some fun. I have a 40gb ps3 ........ I want to upgrade my hd. There was a digg article yesterday on how to (painlessly) upgrade your hd to 500gb which I am going to do as well. I will be taking some photos of the upgrade to post on here.

Ubuntu

So a friend from work has encouraged me to start a blog about my adventures with learning Linux. I mostly use Ubuntu as I am a n00b, but am about to venture to Yellow Dog Linux for my PS3 console. I will be posting about this every step of the way.

Just recently I installed Compiz-Fusion 0.7.7 from the git repository on my Ubuntu hardy heron . I found a wonderful script and instructions by searching around on google for a bit. (http://www.xs4all.nl/~mgj1/compiz_git.htm)
..anyway , I had a problem where my firefox toolbar was missing the back buttons and some other functions after I installed the new compiz. instead of running to google for the answer, I started to look around and see what I though would be the best approch to fixing it before I went for someone elses help. this was the first time I just followed my instinct and knowledge with out researching it first. so I navigated to my home directory where , after working with linux for a while, I know most of my application prefrences are kept. usually programs will store user and application prefrences in folder off your home folder (and I am sure many other things I am not aware of). I saw the ".mozzila" folder. Inside this folder as anohter folder named firefox . sure enough the more file i looked at in this folder i started to noticed all the prefrences / bookmanrks /metadata were held here. I backed up the orginal /home/username/.mozzila/firefox to /home/username/.mozzila/backup.firefox and started firefox. as I suspected firefox recreated the folder with default prefrences and my toolbar was fixed. I know that this is nothing impressive to most linux users but to me it was the first time i ran into a problem i didnt have to run and google to get fixed. hopefully I will learn to trust my knowledge and instinct as time goes on and soon I will be able to troublehsoot and repair linux issues with speed and confidence.

Just an FYI, I always back up before making any change to my system and usually try stuff on a virtual machine with a recent snapshot before I do it on my host OS, I suggest you do the same. I am a N0000000B everyones system is different and I would not suggest blindly trying anything I talk about here. I am no expret and do not want to be responsible for breaking anyones install.