Blog von fugaL

As I just said, I attended fozzmoo’s presentation at the UTOSC. I spent some time trying to get Network Manager installed and working on my laptop before hand, and about half way through the talk. Both fozzmoo and others in the room were very helpful in getting it up and running. Now it is and I must say, it’s pretty slick.

That said, I will tell you that Network Manager isn’t the end-all be-all of your networking experience. It is for a very specific niche, which is for ‘on the go networking’. If you don’t try to shoehorn it outside of this, you’ll have a great time with it.

I mention this because in the presentation several people asked about static ip’s and such. NM doesn’t do these well, nor do I think it really should. I admit though it irked me at first. My next tidbit of helpful information is what actually brought me around to this understanding of what NM is.

At the presentation there was some discussion about ubuntu and network manager. By myself, as you can imagine, as well as others. I poked around on my laptop, and figured out that an interface would only be managed in network manager if it was not in /etc/network/interfaces as well as finding that the normal ubuntu network configuration tool made changes to this file. This concerned me and I made it known to others, saying if you want NM you should go in and disable the interface in ubuntu’s config. That seemed kludgy to me.

Well, when I got home I fiddled with it some more. There I found that you don’t actually have to disable the interface, ubuntu’s config tool actually has an option in the interface properties to put an interface in ‘roaming’ mode. “Cool,” I thought. But more than cool, this is what made me realize the true nature of NM. So I configured some profiles in the network config as such:

• Home: wireless in roaming, wired static on my home network (my laptop serves as gateway through the wireless)
• Caradhras: wireless configured to caradhras (my router) if I’m ever again lucky enough to have my router serve as gateway.
• Other: like it sounds, anywhere I don’t have a specific configuration. This one puts both interfaces in roaming mode.

It’s pretty sweet how they work together once you figure out the respective roles.

IMMS was complaining to me that sox couldn’t read mp3 files to alalyze them. I wasn’t about to let this go on too long, I want IMMS to work to it’s full potential. I tried installing liblame0 and liblame-dev, I even tried libmad but all to no avail. Finally I did apt-cache policy sox. The installed version was some studio version from DeMuDi. I thought if any of the available packages would support mp3 it would be the one from demudi, alas this was not the case. I installed the version from ftp.easynet.fr (PLF) and now I have (readonly) support for mp3. Good enough for me.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if I could see an inline text version of .doc attachments?” I thought. That wish quickly became reality in this well-ended story.

Finding a sufficiently constrained search term proved difficult, so I resorted to #utah. I soon received an answer from spr (thanks man!) citing wv. I installed it with apt-get install wv. Then I constructed this line for ~/.mailcap:

application/msword; /usr/bin/wvText '%s' /dev/stdout; copiousoutput; desciption=DOC Text; nametemplate=%s.doc

Now fire up mutt and read that darned email-with-a-doc-attachment with nary a care.

Argh, for probably the 3rd time now I found myself trying in vain for some time to hunt down that blasted mkmf.rb. For future reference, and for anyone else searching, here it is.

On debian and debian based distros (ubuntu, demudi, etc) to get mkmf.rb for building those neato goodies, just apt-get install ruby-dev.

So my cups queue, which lives on the appartment server, shared amongst three computers, went “off.” I googled around a bit, and apparently this happens when the queue is accessed whilst the printer connection is not available for whatever reason.

I then had to hunt down the way to restart the queue, restarting cups was not enough. I know how to do it with the web interface, but that wasn’t set up, and I wanted the versitility of knowing the command line magic words.

I searched and browsed to no avail, after which I chanced upon the command cupsenable (using a command line and TAB!).

Magic words: cupsenable <queue>

So, I installed udev and nothing, bootup scripts tell me kernel version needs to be >= 2.6.8, and well, there’s a long story that basically says I use 2.6.6. At Hans’ nudge, I modified the startup script to not care about the kernel version and vióla, udev.

Now this is where NVidia enters the story. udev is working great, my /dev directory no longer has a gazillion+ entries but rather fits in one screen. However, upon a reboot, the nvidia device drivers are no longer there. For a few reboots, I simply ran the NVidia installer when X failed to load. This got old fast and I found an answer on google. For debian, at least, you put the following in /etc/udev/links.conf:

M nvidia0 c 195 0

M nvidia1 c 195 1

M nvidiactl c 195 255

The funny thing is that I found this on a Gentoo site, describing the fix as “for debian.”

1. Download the “Linux Binary” j2se jdk from java.sun.org
2. Run the binary
3. mv the resulting jdk directory (e.g. jdk1.5.0) to /usr/local/lib (or /usr/lib if you prefer)
4. `ln -s /usr/local/lib/jdk1.5.0 /usr/local/lib/jdk`
5. Install java-virtual-machine-dummy and make /etc/java-vm look like this (3 lines): `/usr/local/lib/jdk/bin/java` `COMPLIANT`
6. `update-alternatives —config java`
7. `update-alternatives —install javac javac /usr/local/lib/bin/javac 1 —slave javac.1.gz javac.1.gz /usr/local/lib/jdk/man/man1/javac.1`
8. `update-alternatives —config javac`
9. You might need to `ln -s /etc/alternatives/javac /usr/bin/javac`