ThinkBlog

I attempted in vain for an entire night (until the morning, naturally) to do everything in my power to get the RaLink RT61 chipset on this Linksys card running. I’d bought it at a local Wal-Mart for $50 because I was too impatient to do my homework like a good little geek and go to NewEgg like I had for the new laptop. (More on that later!)

RaLink provides drivers for this chipset, but the three options—NdisWrapper, compile the driver natively and install as a module, and the beta software available out there is apparently so beta it should be considered alpha to most who don’t want to pull their hair out.

If you want to do your own research, check out NdisWrapper, the above RaLink URL, and Google “Linux RT61“.

(Be sure to check your version number, though; v4.0 of this card uses the older, more stable and more community-supported RT2500 chipset.)

Round two? The EDIMAX EW-7325IG from NewEgg, with a Linux-compatible Atheros chipset. We’ll see how it works out.

Check this link.

64 Studio is a special Linux version for creating digital contents. It is a software collection based on Debian, containing many 64-bit audio and video editing applications.

Linux specialized for a 64-bit proc with applications for editing sound and video? Wait, isn’t that the Mac department?

Not anymore!

Get more out of your Linux experience, and don’t be afraid of the command-line interface (CLI). Here are a few good references of late:

• CLI Magic: Searching with [the] find [command]. It’s more flexible than you thought.
• A Simple Linux Backup Method. An in-depth yet highly readable HOWTO for making backups that can be fully automated. If you’ve been putting off backing up your data because it’s too complex, your excuses end here.
• Enlightenment 17 QuickStart Guide. Everything that’s good about beautiful open-source software can be summed up in this Linux window manager. Beautiful.
• Data extraction via built-in text utilities. Do you know grep, awk, head, and tail like the back of your hand? Then click and learn.
• Linux Shell Scripting Basics. An excellent reference for the scripting n00b.
• Mastering wget. A great little article with pictures about wget. Remember when I crashed my home-grown server trying to mirror CCEL.org? Oh, no, you wouldn’t have remembered that part … but it happened!
• Regular Expression cheat sheet. This is a single PNG file you can print out or save to your local machine.

SSH Tricks. Including how to wield SCP (secure file copy), how to use SSH without passwords by using the builtin keygen for specific MAC addresses (while noting that it is something of a security hole), remote execution, X11 forwarding (running graphical Linux applications remotely), and mounting a remote folder with SSHFS as an alternative to tunneling SAMBA mounts.

Quite useful, but SirDiggalot (from Digg.com) mentioned that perhaps the best way to get an archive from a remote machine that doesn’t have the resources (e.g., hard drive space) to make a complete tar backup is neglected:

cd /source/dir
tar -cf - . | ssh user@remote "(cd /destination/dir && tar -xpf -)“

Linux From Scratch. For the hardcore only: build your own Linux system, literally from the lowest level up. This isn’t like compiling your own distribution, though: this is like baking a cake by grinding your own flour. It might be the best cake you’ve ever eaten, and you’ll know exactly how to do it, but if you don’t have the stamina of an ultramarathoner and the patience of a tortoise, I can’t imagine being able to recommend this approach.

LearnLINUX: On the other hand, I can heartily recommend this for the novice! This is like a whole class in Linux, for free, online. Everything from Linux history to system administration and shell scripting. Bookmarked!

As BitTorrent gains legitimacy in the Internet marketplace, it’s more and more important to be able to utilize the benefits of P2P networking to share all kinds of files.

I’ve been trying to download a series of files for quite some time now; “old fashioned” means work, but not nearly so efficiently. So, being a die-hard Azureus user ever since I discovered BT a few years ago, I cranked up my copy again to try one last time. (Azureus is an outstanding, cross-platform, Java-based BitTorrent client, and the winner of the SourceForge Community Choice Award, Best Overall for 2006!) Now, previously, I had tried to crank up Azureus and had had limited success in even getting the program running.

I added the torrent I wanted, and waited for the notification icon to turn from “no peers” to seeds and peers connected in a healthy torrent swarm. I waited….

And waited.

And waited some more.

Eventually, I was getting Remotely established connections, but not any locally established. Safepeer wasn’t blocking any connections, for one thing, which is unusual: there are always a few miscellaneous IPs that fail the blacklist checks just from network error, if not from malice. My NAT was routing fine, everything was green, the tracker was returning an OK signal. Nothing. I couldn’t connect outward.

This time, I was on a mission. I was not giving up on this. So I opened up the built-in Azureus IRC support channel and started asking around. No leads.

A little Googling turned up nothing on the matter—until, a few hours later, I sat fuming at the console. What was going wrong? And since when did Azureus spout this many debug messages to stdout when running in the background in non-debug mode?

—That was the tip-off. I looked carefully at the console, freezing the output to allow me to examine the following:

DEBUG::[date]::[specific call that caused the error]
java.net.SocketException: Permission denied
at [snip much more debug nonsense here]

So the problem was in one of the 64-bit libraries in this copy of Azureus; Java was throwing an exception at the socket level: it didn’t have permissions to access the network. Furthermore, I had been using the GNU Java Compiler [roughly] equivalent to version 1.4.2 of Sun’s “official” Java. But Googling this turned up unhelpful results.

Then I tried downloading the latest Java from Sun for the AMD64 platform in an RPM file (wrapped in their license agreement, of course). But when I installed and ran “java -version” or “whereis java” at the console, the system didn’t even see the new install—it was still linked to the GNU compiler! Frustrated, I Googled again, this time for a way to hard-delete option for the GNU compiler, a way to remove it if not with yum or rpm then by hand and reassign the $JAVA_HOME variable….

Then I ran across this invaluable post on the Fedora Forums. The relevant part I’ll echo here to mirror the data, but the credit goes to bytesniper; this version is edited for typos and some emphasis:

There is a link in /usr/bin/java that actually starts java so it needs to be pointed to the correct java installation. The easiest way to do this (to presserve both or all installations of java) is to use alternatives.

if you type alternatives --config java you will see a single entry pointing to something like /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java.

all you need to do is add the link (path) to the new installation of java from sun

alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /pathto/sunjava/java 2
(usage is alternatives <link> <name> <path> <priority>)

once you add the new java configuration to alternatives all you need to do is activate, to tell the system this is what should be run as /usr/bin/java:

alternatives –config java
this will give you a menu of java installations. choose the second option (hence, priority 2) and hit enter. now when you type something like java -jar filename.jar it will use the sun java instead of the inlcuded gcj.

Note: You can also delete /usr/bin/java and make a new symbolic link to the java binary of the new java installation, but I do not recommend this.

When I set up Sun’s as my default Java installation, the problem then became the error when trying to load Azureus, “Wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64.” I was running the latest 64-bit installation of Azureus with the latest version of 64-bit Java on an Athlon64. Given that in this context, ELF stands for “Executable and Linking Format,” this error would be somewhat comparable to getting a “Wrong or Missing DLL” error in Windows when you’re absolutely certain that’s not the case. In short, it was infuriating.

After some more conversation and some more Googling, cyb2063 in the #Azureus-Support channel linked me to this workaround for Mandrake and Azureus on the AMD64 platform. Even after following the instructions to a tee, it still didn’t work.

At this point, I’ll be honest with you, I gave up. If the 64-bit class of my executable format is “wrong,” I figured, I’d just try the 32-bit version. Doing a clean install of 32-bit Azureus corrected all of those problems, and now it’s running like a dream.

---

Now, to summarize, my practical advice if you find yourself in this situation would have to be to do as I did, and install the 32-bit version; but I’m still interested in this from an academic standpoint. If you have any ideas of what I could do differently, I’d be willing to try this all again with the 64-bit version just to get it working and learn something. Let me know. I hope this helps someone out there; thanks to bytesniper and cyb2063, again, for your help.

Most of you who follow this sort of thing know by now that Bill Gates is reversing his roles between Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; in his words, “Right now and for the next two years, my full-time job is here at Microsoft, and my part-time job remains the Foundation. Beginning in July 2008, I will switch that, to be full-time at the Foundation, while remaining involved with Microsoft as Chairman and an advisor on key development projects on a part-time basis.”

NeoWin.net has the full email, which is echoed in blockquote at the end of this article (if you’re on the main page, click “more…” at the bottom of the post).

Guy Kewney posted an insightful write-up on this at TheRegister, in which the critical line seems to be, “As chairman, without needing to worry about whether Vista will be 18 or 30 months late, his influence could paradoxically be far greater. As a Captain of industry, his guidance is far more than just “some geek with money” - he understands the law and what is possible, and what is not, better than any of his contemporaries.” BillG goes from son of lawyers to hardcore programmer to chairman of a multibillion-dollar corporation—and finally to a wielder of political power greater than the power of two lawyers like his parents. (Cf. also Kewney’s response to readers’ responses to his article.)

Meanwhile, I’m intrigued by the sentiment that has arisen not only at Digg and Slashdot and other major cybercenters of geekdom, but all over the Web—kind, almost tender words from people whose vitriol toward “Gates’ corporate imperialism” had previously been unmatchable (and betimes unreadable). Why the switch? I think it has a lot to do with the feeling of losing one’s most formidable opponent—old gods having battled one another across the centuries and lands stand, hands on hilts; one bows, turns, and walks into the ancient mist. Of course, the sentiment is incomplete, or should be, since Gates isn’t dead and neither is MS, but many hardcore Linux geeks realize this is the passing of an era.

When I read Gates (© 1993, 1994 by Stephen Manes & Paul Andrews) over ten years ago, I was fascinated by the idea of a few geeks (hackers, even!) getting together, sleeping under fluorescent lights of your old rented office building, working for twenty hours at a clip on programming the Next Big Thing, ordering in pizza and making mid-day beer runs. Especially coding the “rest” of DOS on a plane on the way to show it off (true story). When something happens of this magnitude, as it must, it must remind some old Linux geeks of the young William Henry Gates III, hacker.

But it’s also a warning. Now, MS becomes faceless: the funny, obnoxiously ubiquitous “Gates of Borg” picture is replaced by a simple sans-serif logo. As Linux gains more prominence on the desktop, especially through Ubuntu and Fedora Core, it has a long battle ahead of it.

(more…)

Ubuntu is the new, up-and-coming Linux distribution based on the rock-solid foundation of Debian/GNU Linux. See screenshots here.

You can order CDs of it for free, or download the ISOs via BitTorrent—legally, thankyouverymuch— and create your own discs (CDs or DVDs).

I’m looking toward Gentoo personally, but if you’re unfamiliar with Linux, this is reputed to be the best option, and easier to install than even Windows XP!

Happy installs!

read more | digg story

Emmy Huang, Product Manager for Flash Player at Adobe, announced the Adobe is developing Flash Player 9 for Linux. First heard about this in the Ubuntu forums in this thread.

This is big news, since Linux users are missing out presently on content made for Flash 8. Granted, it’s not due out till late this year or early next, but it’s an important step in the right direction for Linux support—notably, this will be released when the rest of the population (Windows, Mac) sees it, instead of lagging months behind on half-assed development.

read more | digg story

Can’t quite decide what distribution to use? Let the Linux Distribution Chooser decide for you! Just answer the questions and it will compile a list of choices. One dilemma I faced was that I have my eye on Gentoo, but it suggested SUSE and Mandriva. Nevertheless, it’s not the web-app’s fault if I’ve already made up my mind! Give it a shot. Linux is no longer just for the geek crowd.

In Geekdom, there are perennial debates that carry as much weight as religious discussion: Emacs versus vi, Linux versus BSD, and so forth. One of these debates concerns the desktop platforms of choice. I use and prefer KDE, but GNOME has long been a favorite among Linux users for its sleek interface.

Well, now, behold:

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), the consortium dedicated to the adoption of Linux, and freedesktop.org, the open-source project focused on interoperability for X Window System desktops, announced the technology preview of the first set of common interfaces for the GNOME and KDE Linux desktops, today at LinuxWorld in Boston.

(From DesktopLinux.com)

Glad tidings to be sure! As it stands, each one looks backward and ugly in the other (that is, GNOME programs called while the user is under the KDE desktop will look, well, awful), but this common API is the first step in integrating the two. I agree with those who say that the difference between the two has been hurting the conversion to Linux by mainstream Windows users: it’s too complicated to try to figure out the difference, and because there’s such a polarized opinion base on this matter, it just confuses those who might otherwise be willing to give Linux a shot.

Having installed the xmms-aac RPM-based XMMS plugin for my distro (FC4/x86_64) only to find that XMMS still filled up its buffer and re- and re- and re-filled (”ad nauseum”), I Googled and realized that (1) I was clearly not the only one with this issue. I’d never thought anything of it till I found that the 48kbps Groove Salad stream from SomaFM seriously rivaled its 128kpbs MP3 stream—at less than half the bandwidth! (The irony that this technology comes when I now have the fat phat pipes to handle it is to be set aside for the moment.)

I realized after a while that it wasn’t necessarily AAC that I wanted to play, or MP4, or what-have-you; but aacPlus. I didn’t and, frankly, still don’t, know the difference between the two, but apparently they’re different enough for XMMS to shrug at the latter.

The “Software Audio Players for Linux & BSD” is helpful, but having downloaded numerous of them, I can say that most of them require lengthy compiles and obnoxiously need more fiddling than I have/had time for.

Try Xine, though; it works for me, for a while. It has crashed consistently if I leave it on overnight, or even for more than about eight consecutive hours, but that aside, it’s a good player (especially if you need one NOW).

Google pointed me to BornAgainRadio, where I found an article about how much better aacPlus is than MP3, and I was sold; Xine helps make it happen for me right now, but if you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

One of the most aggravating things for Linux users with heavy browsing-fingers sitting atop their clickable mouse wheels is to be browsing a page and suddenly have something from the clipboard loaded and searched for, as though they’d asked for it purposefully. This could be a useful feature for those who really make use of it, but I’m not one of them, and neither are my guests. This is an enormously helpful feature about Linux, but sometimes browsing with Firefox is made more difficult because of it.

So, here’s the solution.

Type in about:config in the address bar, then search for middlemouse.contentLoadURL and double-click it to set that value to false. The change will take place immediately. Happy browsing!

If you own an Abit motherboard and are a Linux user, you are familiar with the frustration that the proprietary Abit-modified Winbond chip that they’ve dubbed “μGuru” (commonly uGuru, but pronounced and spelled with a Greek “mu,” “mu-Guru”) is unsupported under Linux. Hans de Goede created a program based on Olle Sandberg’s original program to interface with this chip.

Olle’s “oguru” program [link to actual program here] works. Unfortunately, it’s only a once-invoked, stdout-based commandline version.

Tobias van Dyk, on the other hand, created a plugin for GKrellM2 based on oguru that updates the CPU, system, and power supply temperature and shows the voltages of several key monitors by interfacing with the chip and displaying this information in GKrellM2. You can find this plugin here.

When compiling, if you’re on an x86_64 machine like I am, you’re going to need to update the line #include <asm/io.h> to say, #include <sys/io.h> as on Athlon 64 machines, calls to either asm-i386 or asm-x86_64 as such are deprecated (and asm alone isn’t defined at all!).

Note that in order to run this plugin without a segfault from GKrellM2, you’re going to need to run it as root.

Today I spent three minutes using compressed air to blow out my computer case; another three vacuuming up; a couple of seconds slotting the new (new-to-me, not as in, “latest and greatest”) Nvidia GeForce 5200 video card, and thirty minutes trying to remember how to keep Xwindows from firing back up every time I’d kill it. (kill -9 [X pid], Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, when all your options are exhausted, now that’s frustrating).

Remember this, folks.

As root, change the number `5′ in the line in /etc/inittab that says id:5:initdefault to a 3. This will load everything up through the network, but not start the X server.

This is important when your video card drivers require X to be shut down. Meanwhile, if you have the runlevel set to five and X won’t shut up, it’s like those trick self-relighting birthday cake candles, only seven or eight times as annoying!

Also remember, Nvidia > ATI when it comes to graphics support for Linux. I voted with my dollars. Nvidia’s closed-source, but they have real Linux support; ATI Linux support looks like everyone else’s from back in mid ‘95.

Ever since I installed Fedora Core 4 on my new machine, I’ve been using a simple firewall script that does an excellent job without being excessively end-user configured. Extensibility is no doubt the foremost feature of Dr. Bob Sully’s hardcore set of IPTables firewalling scripts, and for the übergeek I would still recommend that one—but if you don’t have time to worry about a firewall on your Linux box, check out the Projectfiles.com Linux Firewall.

The Projectfiles.com Linux Firewall is the swiss army knife of Linux firewall software. Based on the netfilter-iptables tools, the firewall is a single shell executable written in bash with configuration options and basic documentation included in the same file. It is a flexible tool for building secure networks, designed for use with all types of systems: workstations, routers, and servers, plus it includes optional features for advanced users and Internet Service Providers.