Eamonn O'Brien-Strain

October 14, 2006

date: '2006-10-14 11:29:11' layout: post slug: '116' status: publish title: Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows? wordpress_id: '116' categories: Programming

With Ubuntu it seems that Linux is getting closer to be a viable replacement for Windows. I am several days into my experiment of running Ubuntu as my operating system on my laptop. So far it is going fairly well, but I have hit the following problems:

I cannot get the Evolution connection to my companies Exchange server to work correctly. For mail this is not a problem, because I can use an IMAP connection, but I really need to be able to connect to the Exchange calendar.
Ubuntu does not deal with monitors well. It defaulted to a fairly low resolution and I had to do some arcane command-line magic and answer many questions about my LCD screen capabilities that I did not have readily to hand. Not very friendly for a non-technical user. Also it appears that if I want to be able to run with a second monitor attached to my laptop I have to do some pretty complex config file hacking. It sure would be nice if Linux had something as convenient as Windows display properties configuration GUI.
The usual VPN solution for my company only works on Windows. I will have to jump through some hoops to be able to work from home.

So I am glad I configured my laptop for dual boot. That way I can fire up Windows when I need it.

One nice feature I found is that I can hibernate both WIndows and Linux, so that when I reboot to switch I am switching into a saved state of the other operating system. However I did find some problem getting the wireless connection to work on Linux after waking up.

October 14, 2006

date: '2006-10-14 12:59:43' layout: post slug: mounting-windows-disks-under-linux status: publish ref: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper#How_to_mount_Windows_partitions_.28FAT.29_on_boot-up.2C_and_allow_all_users_to_read.2Fwrite title: Mounting windows disks under Linux wordpress_id: '117' categories: Programming

I followed these instructions for how to mount a FAT partition read-write for communication between Windows and Linux on my laptop. I also followed the instructions further down to mount the main windows NTFS partition read-only.

It is a pity that the Ubuntu System->Administration-Disks->Partitions GUI does not allow you to do this. THough at least I was able to use the GUI to find out the device names of my partitions.

October 12, 2006

date: '2006-10-12 16:44:12' layout: post slug: fixvideoresolutionhowto-community-ubuntu-documentation status: publish ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FixVideoResolutionHowto title: FixVideoResolutionHowto – Community Ubuntu Documentation wordpress_id: '115' categories: Futzing

One problem with my Ubunto installation on my laptop is that the max resolution I can set was 1024x768 which is pretty crowded for doing software development in Eclipse. So I followed the instructions in FixVideoResolutionHowto – Community Ubuntu Documentation:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.custom sudo sh -c 'md5sum /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /var/lib/x11/xorg.conf.md5sum' sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

update Well, that worked, but not without problems. I was asked a daunting amount of questions by the dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg program. When asked what were the allowed resolutions I just selected everything — the instructions seemed to suggest that was safe. I suppose I should have rebooted into Windows to check what are reeally allowed. Now I do get Ubuntu running in higher resolution, though a bit distorted I think because the aspect ratio is not quite right. However if I try to change the resolution using the Preferences UI the computer freezes and has to be hard-reset.

update 2 Firstly, I forgot to mention that I needed to to a CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to restart X to see the effect of the above change.

Secondly, a strong warning: when I tried to do this on a desktop machine on which I was installing Ubuntu a few days later it killed X and threw me back to the command line. I think it was because I chose the option to automatically detect the monitor. In that case all I really wanted to do was increase the monitor refresh rate to avoid an annoying flickr. So after the above technique failed I instead I edited the /etc/X11/xorg.conf config script modifing the monitor refresh rate line to

VertRefresh 43-85

and restarted X. That seems to have worked fine.

October 12, 2006

date: '2006-10-12 15:04:15' layout: post slug: setting-up-laptop-for-dual-booting status: publish ref: http://www.ubuntu.com/download title: Setting up laptop for dual booting wordpress_id: '112' categories: Programming

Well, I just received a new laptop at work and our IT department put their standard Windows XP image onto it. I decided I wanted to be able to also run Linux on this machine.

Step 1: Before I even logged into Windows for the first time I rebooted off a Partition Magic CD and shrunk the Windows partition to half the size of the 93 GB disk. I then added a small 2GB FAT partition where I will be able to share files between Linux and Windows. The remaining space I left unallocated.

Step 2: I logged into Windows got on the web and downloaded the latest Ubuntu ISO which was 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake). And burned a CD.

Step 3: I rebooted off the Ubuntu CD and clicked the install icon on the desktop. I chose the option to use the remaining empty space (not overwrite whole disk). After the installation completed and I rebooted, everything worked fine. By default it boots into Linux, but there is an option to choose Windows instead.

Step 4: I did a little customization. I used the Applications->Add/Remove menu item to add Thunderbird which I am more familiar with than the Evolution mail client that comes with Ubuntu. I also used this nice graphical installer to install Emacs which is of course the One True Editor.

There, that was not too hard.

October 12, 2006

date: '2006-10-12 15:08:08' layout: post slug: java-se-downloads status: publish ref: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp title: Java SE Downloads wordpress_id: '113' categories: Programming

I had to go to Sun's Java SE Downloads web site to download Java, which is not available via the Ubuntu installer. I considered using one of the open source Java SDKs intead but I make extensive use of Java 1.5 features which are not yet I think well supported by non-Sun compilers.

The installation is not quite as magic as the Windows installation but it is fairly convenient. You get a self-extracting file that you execute. This simply unpacks the Java SDK into a directory. I just left the SDK directory as a subdirectory of my home directory. No root access needed; no messing around with system areas needed.

October 12, 2006

date: '2006-10-12 15:45:28' layout: post slug: eclipse-downloads-home status: publish ref: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ title: Eclipse downloads home wordpress_id: '114' categories: Programming

Next I went to the Eclipse downloads home to get the next vital piece of Java development kit. I just extracted the Linux archive file into a subdirectory of my home directory, navigated into that folder and executed it. It started up right away using the 1.4.2 GCJ Java SDK that comes with Ubuntu.

The next thing I added to Eclipse was subversion support. First I went to Window->Preferences->Install/Update in Eclipse to add the HTTP proxy for my corporate firewall. Then I followed the subeclipse instructions for downlading and installing from within Eclipse.

I also need CVS for some projects but for some reason I could not get that to work from within Eclipse even after I had installed the system CVS from the Ubuntu installer. So in the end I used the command-line CVS to check out my module and din an Import from within Eclipse to read it in.

I used Windows->Preferences->Java-Installed JREs to add my newly installed Sun JDK 1.5. Then I set the Java compiler level to 5.0 so that my code would compile OK.

October 11, 2006

date: '2006-10-11 15:31:24' layout: post slug: wp-cache-and-the-blank-page-problem-at-blogging-blog status: publish ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20061027164106/http://www.bloggingblog.net/wp-cache-and-the-blank-page-problem/ title: WP-Cache and the Blank Page problem at Blogging Blog wordpress_id: '110' categories: Programming

WP-Cache and the Blank Page problem at Blogging Blog

I was running into this problem as I attempted to speed up this blog using WP-Cache. The fix described here worked like a charm.

Eamonn O'Brien-Strain

October 14, 2006

October 14, 2006

October 12, 2006

October 12, 2006

October 12, 2006

October 12, 2006

October 11, 2006

September 7, 2006

August 30, 2006

June 18, 2006