Blog von fugaL

Bye Bye smbfs

Please, Von, please, next time you set up a samba mount, just use cifs and not smbfs. Save yourself a lot of headache.

Network Manager

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.

Rails and SQLite3: Default Values

Here’s another rails fix. This one is for SQLite3 >= 3.3.8. SQLite decided to return sql strings for the default values shown in table definitions. This broke rails, the rails people got mad and won’t introduce a workaround. Well here’s my workaround.

sqlite_fix.rb:

module ActiveRecord
            module ConnectionAdapters
              class SQLiteAdapter < AbstractAdapter
                def columns table_name, name=nil
                  table_structure(table_name).map do |field|
                    /^'?(.*)'?$/.match field['dflt_value']
                    field['dflt_value'] = $1
                    SQLiteColumn.new(field['name'], field['dflt_value'], field['type'], field['notnull'] == "0")
                  end
                end
              end
            end
          end

Include it at the end of environment.rb. That’s it!

MP3 Woes

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.

Quodlibet idiosyncrasies

I’ve been using quodlibet for a couple weeks now. I actually was introduced to it by my brother Hans some time ago, but it lacked an imms interface so I clung to xmms. Subsequently, xmms managed, in it’s awesome ability to annoy, to drive me away once and for all.

Using quodlibet I now have a couple fun projects ahead of me. First is writing an imms plugin for it. Next is fixing some quirky behaviour involving the play queue. Queue is probably the most awesome media player feature since random/shuffle. It allows you to add specific songs to come next without muddling around with the playlist itself—the playlist can happily remain in random mode or any other mode you can fathom.

Now I describe those queue quirks. If someone wants to tackle them before I get to it, go ahead. Just let me know so I don’t duplicate a work in progress. ;) Both issues seem to arise from the fact that a song in queue is a seperate instance that != the same song in list. This causes problem 1) the playlist doesn’t show the current song as playing or jump to it. Problem 2) likewise, when quiting quodlibet, the queue state, the playlist state, and the current playing song are all saved. However, upon resuming the current song, if derived from queue, fails to register as anything and doesn’t play. I assume this is because song_from_queue != anything_in_list.

Quirky Queues

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>

udev and NVidia

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.”