Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the new version of Ubuntu. I do how ever have a couple of gripes which are problably more just minor annoyances than anything. Thunderbird I dislike, time will tell wheather that will change. As it stands I think Thunderbird 3.0.4 looks horrible. I might have to look at Evolution again.

Flash video’s did not work after the upgrade from 9.04, I had to rip out the flash pkgs and re-install them. Minor thing really, but the re-install fixed the issue.

Gwibber doesn’t seem to appear on the system tray anymore. When I close the window it closes it and I need to go through the menus to re-load it. Maybe I’m missing something, also one of my Twitter accounts seems to have been misplaced.

Bilbo blogger has now changed it’s name to Blogilo, thats cool. I have no problem with a name change, but it didn’t migrate my blog accounts over. I had to add all my blog accounts to it. Again a minor thing which only took up a few minutes. But it would have been nice if it migrated the settings / blog accounts across.

Firefox lost it’s icon on the menu, Not that I use Firefox (Chrome is my browser of choice), I thought it rather odd that it lost the icon however. Editing the menu and putting it back fixed it

All in all, I think Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx at this stage is looking pretty impressive.

I’m currently running the studio systems on USB key installs of Ubuntu. So far everything seems to be working well. I’ll be testing the recording software over the next few days and will be recording this weeks XTN on Ubuntu. Still deciding if I should use a Windows backup recorder just in case, and that probably won’t be a silly idea really.

Still have a little issue with the Linux blogging clients. I use Windows Live Writer which for a Microsoft application works really well in conjunction with WordPress. Also, I used iTunes to write the ID3 tags and insert album art so I’m also going to be playing with the ID3 tag editors under Linux.

I’m writing this on Lekhonee which is a gnome WordPress client. Anyway, all going well this time in a couple of weeks all the systems will be re-installed with Ubuntu.

If anyone is running Linux software for podcast production, I’d love to hear what software you use.

Once I get everything sorted on the Linux side, I’ll post a writeup with what I decide to use software wise.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7

I can understand Nuonce removing their repository for yum, but why go and do something that seems to be just stupid.

I see Solarspeed.net still has the .pkg available for download for the yum-gui but I suspect if it were to be installed a yum update would promptly remove it again.

Ok well, I have just tested it on my server. and if you install the .pkg from SolarSpeed.net it seems to stay there. I guess time will tell for how long.

Heck, how often do you get a 1u rack mount server for under $100 that is a reasonable spec machine. Dual processor with a gig of ram.

It’s now running the web sites I have and doing a very good job of it so far. It seems to handle running Fedora reasonably well and the installation was no cause for concern. It sounds a bit like a jet because of the fans in it, so it’s been nick named "The Jet" I would hate to imagine the noise of a rack of these things.

I was watching an IBM xServer which went for $255 but unfortunately it was a little out of the budget at the time.

Well, I have a licence for Windows XP professional, and while I am not one to generally endorse Microsoft. I find myself having installed Windows XP on my Acer Aspire 4315. I’m going to dual boot it with Ubuntu 8.10 when it is released.

My decision to install Windows came from the small hardware issues I was having with Ubuntu 8.04. I was having intermittent wireless problems with the Atheros wireless drivers, Printing issues and various other little things under Linux. I am pleased to say that I have no such problems under Windows XP. I do hope Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10) will solve many if not all the issues I was having. But for now, Windows XP is working like a dream. I guess I am hoping Linux will have no hardware issues once Windows XP becomes completely unsupported as I will not upgrade from Windows XP to any other Windows version.

I almost hate to say I am running Windows XP on it. but, like I said while I am not generally one to endorse Microsoft products. We live in a world where hardware is designed for Windows and is generally better supported under Windows.

I have got everything working like a dream, Sound, Modem, Network, Wireless, Dual View/TV out, Webcam etc…. I have even found Windows Live Writer to be an excellent desktop blogging package.

For those of you looking for Windows XP drivers for Acer Aspire 4315 Notebook. Google search the following drivers. All implement well and so far have given me no cause for concern

AHCI_Intel_v7.5.0.1017_XP
Audio_Realtek_v6.0.1.5413_R167_XP_Vista
Chipset_Intel_v8.3.0.1013_XP32
Lan_Marvell_v10.15.4.3
Modem_Lite-on_v.2.1.77.9
TouchPad_Synaptics_v9.1.11.0_XP32
VGA_Intel_v6.14.10.4847win2k_xp
Wireless_Atheros_V5.3.0.67_XP_XB63_XB62(WHQL)

If you know of better drivers please leave a comment. These work for me but I can’t guarantee they will work for everyone else..

I have been reading the Ubuntu Website & Forums

I’m kind of excited about the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) You can view the Release Schedule

I guess I’m interested to see how upgrading from Hardy goes on my laptop. The last upgrade I did using a package manager ( yum on Fedora 8 ) left some problems lying around with packages that caused dependancy conflicts with future Fedora 9 updates. It wasn’t really hard to remove the problematic packages from Fedora 8 on Fedora 9. Though it would have been nice if Fedora had taken care of them to begin with. It’s not like they were packages from other repos.

Anyway, It will be good to see how Ubuntu handles upgrading Hardy to Intrepid. Ubuntu 8.10 release is scheduled for 30th October 2008, so I will let you all know how I get on with upgrading my Acer Aspire 4315 laptop.

I just bought a new Acer Aspire 4315 Laptop from Dick Smith which came with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. I have to admit I am very impressed with it. I had a little issue with the wireless drivers but it was easily fixed. The only bit that isn’t supported is the 56k modem, as it is linked with the sound system I read that getting the modem to run can screw up the whole install so I won’t bother looking into it. I don’t use 56k modem’s for net connections, It’s either wired or wireless so the modem not running does not bother me in the slightest. The rest of the hardware was supported out of the box with out me having to go though and struggle setting setting up hardware drivers. Skype does some problems with the capture device and I still have a problem with it resetting the capture volumes back to 0, but I don’t see it as too much of an issue at the moment.

I have yet to try my webcam, I will have to do that when I get home as we are in Auckland until Monday. Over all I am very pleased with the Acer and it was cheaper than I was expecting plus it came with a free upgrade to 1gig of ram.

For this you simply need the Windows 9x/XP drivers for your specific adapter. On my system I was installing for the Acer (??) WarpLink 802.11b Adapter. you can use lsusb or lspci to find out the name of your adapter and search for drivers online if you need to.

First you need to install NDISWrapper, I found it easier to install this from the Livna repository with a simple

yum install ndiswrapper

Once ndiswrapper is installed you can simply apply the following commands. Be sure to change eu3nic.inf to the correct .inf file for your adapters driver.

sudo ndiswrapper -i eu3nic.inf

next:
check that the driver got installed by executing:

sudo ndiswrapper -l

next make sure ndiswrapper is loaded at bootup:

sudo ndiswrapper -m

next configure your Wlan card: Replace essid with your networks ESSID and enc with your networks key

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid
sudo iwconfig wlan0 enc

Use DHCP to "get" an IP address assigned to your card:

sudo dhclient wlan0

NOTE: if you don’t get an IP address for some reason you may have to click on SYSTEM then ADMINISTRATION then NETWORK and deselect and then reselect the check box to the left of your wireless entry, then run the above dhclient command again. Also if you are running in a shell as root you can omit the sudo in the front of the commands.

You also need to be aware that any updates of the systems kernel will mean the NDISWrapper kernel module will need to be reinstalled on the new kernel

I happened to be browsing through the Add/Remove software Multimedia section when I found Amarok.

Banshee RPM Description

It’s great to see more and more women getting involved in Open Source software and even putting their hand up to say "I use it"

While I feel Fedora is stable on the most part to provide me a desktop pc I still don’t know if I’d run it as a full time, live server.

My preferred server os of choice is CentOS with BlueQuartz Bluequartz is based upon the Cobalt RaQ 550 server appliance control panel software.

If you are looking for a Server appliance OS Centos with Bluequartz built in can be downloaded from NuOnce Networks

The advantages I’ve found to CentOS/BlueQuartz is the fact that where some other linux distros such as Fedora have a supported life span. So instead of having to upgrade on a new release by CD/DVD or even apt or yum. CentOS will update via yum periodically and will include new versions/releases of the main OS.

By memory I installed CentOS/BQ a few releases ago and have had to do very little to keep it up to date. However Fedora on the hand I have had to spend some time keeping up with each major release. For example a web hosting company here in NZ are still running Fedora Core 6 as public servers. As far as I am awhere, security updates for Fedora Core 6 are no longer being released. Where as CentOS/BQ are still releasing security and bug fixes where required.

Having said that. Look around at other Distro’s such as Debian, Mandriva etc.. Having personally been drawn to Red Hat / Centos and Fedora I am unsure of the life span of other distro’s as far as update support goes. So before jumping in and installing a Server have a look around and read each distro’s sites to make sure than in 3 years time you’re not going to find your self out on a limb with a server full of security issues or other bugs that are not fixed in your release of that distro.

Installing via YUM.

You can install Skype using yum by creating /etc/yum.repos.d/skype

[skype]
name=Skype Repository
baseurl=http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/fedora/updates/i586/
gpgkey=http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/rpm-public-key.asc
enabled=1

Then issuing a command of

# yum install skype

This will install the required dependencies for you. You can also use the yum repo to keep Skype up to date during your normal yum updates.

The work around for this is simple enough to do, but must be done after each update to OpenOffice.org.

Under Fedora you need to edit /usr/lib/openoffice.org/program/soffice this is a bash script which launches the appropriate OpenOffice.org application. and locate the following on lines 42-44

# file locking now enabled by default
SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1
export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING

Simply put a # infront of lines 43 and 44 so it looks like

# file locking now enabled by default
#SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1
#export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING

Save your changes. This will enable saving and editing documents on NFS filesystems.

I have installed BloGTK on Fedora 9. So far everything seems to be working great.