BBC's 24 hours with Ubuntu! Really?

This is in response to BBC's review of Ubuntu on its blog, spending only 24 hours with it, that too after they made erroneous statements about Ubuntu while advertising Windows 7 on their breakfast show. This follow-on for reviewing Ubuntu by BBC, after that faux pas on the show, was initiated by Canonical.

Most of it has been said, I'll try to say some things that got left out. Not one person made a point about how simple Ubuntu install can be for a Windows user who wants to try his toe in the water: wubi (ubuntu installer for windows)! Just download wubi.exe, run it from Windows, define how much space to use for Ubuntu, choose login creds, take a coffee/ lunch break, return to your comp with a dual install! Days of Linux install have become simpler since Knoppix launched a live CD that announced vocally on what devices are detected and installed! Just when I thought it doesn't get any simpler than that, Ubuntu gets better with each release.

Microsoft is so greedy, that when I bought my Toshiba laptop, I was forced to buy it with Vista, with a caveat that said "Installing any other OS voids the warranty". Even if I wanted to have dual boot, I couldn't do that in warranty. Funnily enough, any reinstall of Vista and other Windows flavours arrogantly overwrites any other OS! Why?

For almost everything that Linux can do with a command line for a desktop user, Ubuntu can do with GUI. Another thing about people who just hate to use keyboards are missing a loud point even in Windows GUI: all those menus have keyboard 'short'-cuts! Sometimes, keyboard is faster than the mouse.

If you've tried detecting and transferring files between XP and Vista on your network, that would tell you why expecting all your Windows machines to just popup on your Ubuntu map, without any protocol setups, is plain bias.

MrFaulty talks of WiFi install issues as a techie. WiFi on Vista has been a pain for me; it gets some godforsaken IP on a DHCP mode and I need to hardcode it to work well! Windows should have perfected it by now, but no; OTOH, it works smoothly in Ubuntu. And he also talks of RAID 0 when the article is about a layman desktop user. What you can do with Win for RAID, a similar experienced person on Ubuntu can do it in a jiffy too. But then again, if you are a technology person, you ought to mention developers, rate at which bugs get fixed on Ubuntu and umpteen development tools that come free, all of these things beat down Windows to death.

Getting hold of Wine to run Spotify is not as much of a bother as needing to get hold of Win7 pro version to do something as simple as getting an XP app/ device to work! The latter means shelling more money out to get Win7 do something that your XP did initially, which you'd already paid for, and MS made you buy Win7 instead. The former means installing Wine with a couple of steps and you're ready to go... simpler than buying local wine! :)

Finally, Rory, I think Ubuntu survived your 24 hours with it. Had you been a Linux user as long as you were using Windows and had to spend 24 hours with Windows 7 instead, I'm certain you'd have flushed the Windows netbook/laptop by now! :)

Getting Firefox backspace work on Ubuntu

For some like me who love the keyboard, more than mouse at times, Firefox on Ubuntu could get a little irritating to navigate between already surfed pages. On WinDoze, Firefox by default allows backspace to take you back to last visited page (while shift+backspace takes you one page forward). Of course, this is only with default settings and mostly everything is customizable. However, being the lazy me, I didn't do anything about it thus far.

Today, I did the following simple change to get it working and it didn't even need a browser-restart :)

i) Go to about:config by typing the same in the URL.
ii) Promise to be careful with it :)
iii) Type backspace in the filter-bar.
iv) Change the value of browser.backspace_action to 0 (by default, its 2)

You're done. No need to close the browser. Just press backspace and go back to where you left off before irritating yourself because backspace didn't work! ;)

Firefox Shiretoko

Firefox 3.5, code-named Shiretoko, has a brand new feature called private browsing. Its very useful if you share the laptop with some visitors every now and then, but not often enough for them to have a Firefox profile.

This feature, as some might think, is not proxy-browsing which hides and translates your IP into something else. Its also not really a setting which deletes all your history, cache and cookies when you close the browser. Its some of it and a little more. With Shiretoko, you can privately browse while keeping your old tabs intact. So if your friend drops by and wants to check his mail on your laptop, you just give him private browsing, without actually logging out of your mail and other accounts, while he gets a clean browser and leaves it clean too. Shiretoko continues just where you left off when he's done browsing privately!

Matrix in Windows!

You've to watch this if you liked Matrix and/ or like Ubuntu and/ or dislike Windoze: "Ubuntu. I'm going to learn Ubuntu".

Epson TX101 installation

Update, Jaunty onwards: Epson has a new release with libtdl7 support. Try that first instead of wasting your time doing the following. The following works only for Intrepid 8.10 and perhaps, Hardy 8.04 release with an Epson driver for libtdl3.

(In case you hit this page to find how-to install, skip blabber, jump straight to end of this weblog for stepwise instructions)

I bought Epson TX101 printer-scanner-copier a few days back and was waiting for the Epson chap to install it due to warranty issues that the seller told me of. Needless to say, when he turned up yesterday, not only didn't he know Ubuntu installation, but he hadn't even heard Ubuntu or Linux for that matter! He did some basic Vista install and looking at his "expertise", I had to ask him to just make the installation report and leave.

My efforts on getting it to work on Ubuntu took long U-turns due to my stupidity. First of all, I tried things yesterday night when I was barely keeping myself awake on the chair! Back to technicality, I tried gutenprint, iscan, xsane, CUPS and pips, when things didn't work by default when I plugged in the USB. Of course, I made the mistake of typing in xane instead of xsane earlier on. But today, I started afresh when iscan install cried for libltdll3 in the night! Later I found out that iscan was (perhaps) installed by default on Kubuntu, with a dependency error; same thing as libltld3.

Intrepid, possibly Hardy too, uses libltdl7. So a simple fix is to make a soft link to libltdl3 and I should have been on the way, but it didn't work. It needed a simple replug of USB cable and not only iscan, xsane worked too!

Steps:

1. Download the correct package from http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/spc/DL1.do.
2. Make sure you have sane and sane utils installed. Use sudo synaptic to find out.
3. Also make sure you have libltdl7. (Of course, you can't get a libltdl3! :) )
   
4. Install Image Scan and Print system by running sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=libltdl3 iscan_2.17.0-3_i386.deb (or whatever the name/version is).
5. Do a sudo find / -name libltdl.so.7. cd there. (Of course, one level higher!!!)
   
6. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl.so.7 libltdl.so.3.
7. For some reason (read above blabber), I did the following too. Do it if you need to.
   
8. Do a sudo find / -name libltdl7. cd there. (Of course, one level higher!!!)
   
9. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl7 libldtl3
10. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl7 libldtl3-dev
11. Plug-out (if plugged in) and plug-in the TX101 USB cable. I didn't do this and wasted a lot of time finding out why iscan and/ or xsane wasn't working. Both were needing me to replug the TX101!
12. You're done.
13. Test printer: Go to http://localhost:631 for CUPS, check if you've the printer right. Do a test print. You'll get the print below.
14. Test scanner: Open iscan or xsane. Scan works as below. :)

Intrepid Ibex on laptop

I've managed to get to Kubuntu on my Toshiba laptop, downloading a wubi based install throughout the day yesterday. Kubuntu kept me awake nearly till 0200 with its vibrant GUI and new apps. I was trying to get all work at once, but succeeded with some till sleep took over.

This morning, I found out that although I got the latest version 8.10 running, I've stumbled upon a non-LTS (Long Term Support) release post Hardy Heron 8.04. The next LTS release is Kubuntu 9.10 way ahead in Oct 2009, while another non-LTS Jaunty Jackalope is scheduled for April 2009.

A few days back, I made a wubi shift on my 64-bit dualcore AMD Anthlon XP2 desktop too, of course on NTFS now, but intend to make it a pure ext3 Linux machine. I want to continue shuffling WinDoze Vista for a while on the laptop alongside Kubuntu, just because I was forced to buy it in the laptop price! ;)

Why's Ubuntu special?

Ubuntu's very special due to simplicity, and absolute simplicity at that, has 32/ 64 bit versions, support for almost all the devices/ peripherals and speedy fixes. But I've a single reason above all those reasons. Its based on the best of the distributions: Debian. I'm not sure I'm loud and clear here, so I'll go on...

Debian was once the most complicated installation, with hardly any other flavor than the German. Its installation was in German, all docs, everything. Not many could install it back then and therefore, very few got to use it. It was still the best distribution then. What is interesting to note is that the makers of Ubuntu built on Debian, the best distribution available then, available in the least user-friendly way and turned it the most user-friendly distribution without messing up the best things.

Whats more, you get to pick between plain vanilla Ubuntu with Gnome, Kubuntu with KDE, Xubuntu which is packaged for speed, Edubuntu for education and Gobuntu thats totally GNU/ FSF!

Not BSNL, Vista blues!

One thing about blogging about Linux is that it contrasts against Microsoft way of doing things. That is, Linux does things in a standard way but Microsoft keeps on contradicting itself.

Now, this one is about setting up the BSNL provided router to let wired access for PC and wireless access for laptop. I suspected BSNL and/ or UTStarcom's stupid router to be the culprit when I'd trouble with DHCP. (I did mention that I moved my PC to Ubuntu yesterday, but I'm still stuck on Vista for my laptop). The wireless adapter on the laptop wasn't getting a DHCP IP 192.168.1.x and somehow got some funny IP 169.254.205.173! Ergo, no LAN or WAN access. Instead, I'd to force a static IP on the laptop to access the router settings, force it to bridge mode and then dial up PPPoE from laptop! This pathetic setting would also mean that I can use either the laptop or the PC, basically one client at a time and also means on-demand connection from that client! I tried almost every setting with the router, including adding MAC filter for wireless access, but made no progress.

I knew there was something fishy about DHCP but didn't know what. So I began on that thread of thinking: why the hell does Vista get me a nonsense IP? Whats 169.254.205.173? Then I searched online on network classes to find that this is a fallback IP if everything else fails! How can DHCP fail for wireless/ Vista and still work for wired/ XP or wired/ Ubuntu? It turns out Vista was the culprit here with the wireless adapter not getting DHCP, it was falling back on 169.254.205.173 which was its autoconfiguration IP, a zeroconfig! More search online led to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233 which says "Windows Vista cannot obtain an IP address from certain routers or from certain non-Microsoft DHCP servers"... hmm, interesting, very interesting, note the words "non-Microsoft". What do you mean non-MS DHCP servers? Shouldn't you be saying Vista is non-DHCP OS in some way instead? Be as it may. :) The MS suggested solution is to add a DWORD32 DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle flag set to 1 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID} where GUID is the network adapter that you want to Vistafy or Vis**-up! :)

I blog this only as a reference for some or even me if I go mad to come back and use Vista ever again. This might work for some, it didn't work for me. But taking hint from the MS article, I'd to finger wireless network properties to "connect even if the network is not broadcasting". This worked, yes! I got a clean DHCP IP and things seem good.

IDE and debuggers

Since the time I started programming, I've been using printfs for debugging. For some reason, I found it much easier, better and concrete overall compared to any tools. So my programming tools have almost always been vi and printfs. Of course, when I was forced into using Visual Studio, I did use the VS debugging tools, but they were limited only to looking up values in runtime than anything, something that you'd do with gdb or printfs. IDEs and debuggers do make life easier in the short run but they *help* build bad habits, quite similar to relying on word processors that correct your language even if you write syntactically incorrect stuff. A bad coder, similarly, tends to rely on IDEs to help the syntax and debuggers to assist fix an unthought piece of code already written!

Today, all that came back when I was looking up to tune the Ubuntu install to see what all I'm missing that I may use once in a while. Not that I'm doing any coding, but I began looking up IDEs that came up on Linux since Anjuta. Looks like KDevelop and Anjuta are still going good. Funnily enough that led me to some pros-and-cons debate of using IDE, which had a link to what Linus Torvalds feels about debuggers, more clearly kernel debuggers, aka "I'm a bas****" mail. :)

Goodbye Windoze!

(Shifted from anythingwise blogged yesterday)

I'm up and running on Ubuntu 8.04 for my 64 bit system and looks like I've already fallen in love with it. :)

Of course, my installation may have been non-standard first time in all these years because after cleaning up one drive and before beginning an Ubuntu installation, I did the following:
--Searched Ubuntu 64 bit binaries on the system. I found the ones I'd downloaded. Unzipped them. Was thinking of burning a CD and starting Ubuntu installation, but...
--While going through them I found a Windows executable, perhaps wubi.exe. Running it just installed everything in an NTFS partition without removing anything, moreover, from within Win XP! Ubuntu really believes in simplicity, doesn't it? :)
--A reboot led to installation and I switched on the DSL just in case it needs it. Everything done.
--Then it asked me if I wanted to get a proprietary Nvidia driver for my graphics card and downloaded them without hiccups.
--The programmer within me tested cc first, which was working. So I tried c++ which it asked to confirm, downloaded and installed!!!

No wonder, Ubuntu stands for: Linux for humans. :D