Tuesday, April 22, 2008

It is the WashingMachine!!

Many times I got bad talked by my girlfriend that not putting socks together is the main reason for loosing them. I was never sure, but I always had a weird feeling it has to be the washing machine, just never caught it, until today! I am really sure the machine ate one white sock! hahaaa!

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Upgrading to Hardy Heron

With 7.04 version of ubuntu I was quite happy, most of the hardware worked and GNOME was already very usable and cool. I was looking forward 7.10 to polish some issues and be THE DISTRO for masses. I even got new Dell Vostro laptop with mostly Intel hardware.

Ubuntu 7.10 is quite cool distro which delivered some very nice features but many things didn't work. It was probably because most of the open source conferences where held at spring and then came summer and not much time was left to polish and test. Laptop was without a sound at all, email client evolution gave a lot of nasty bugs, cisco vpn client didn't compile and few more. Similar situation with friend's Dell Lattitude which also includes problems with Boradcom wifi driver. However over time I managed to get everything working (except for the integrated microphone). But I had a wierd issue with Cisco VPN client which corrupted my username in config file whenever I presses Ctrl-C on login promtp. The microphone and this was the only thing I was not happy about. Otherwise the system was fast (I never experienced "window refresh is being rendered" feeling like I regurlary get when working with MS Windows), stable and joy to work with.

However I discovered new version of Cisco VPN client is out, so I compiled and it worked.... for a few minutes. Then hard freeze, only holding power button for 4 secs (I wonder how many people know this trick and how many are pulling the cable) helped, something really happening in the kernel. I managed to track it to:
  1. recent upgrade of ubuntu kernel
  2. recent wierd behaviour of ipw3945 (likely after the kernel upgrade)
  3. cisco vpn client
  4. SMP system (as others suggested)
One of the solution was to upgrade to kernel 2.6.24 so I tried. I got new kernel (2.6.24-12), compiled latest Cisco VPN client (4.8.01.0640-k9) and it worked. No more hungs. Nice, problems solved. Oops my sound subsystem is gone again. No wonder, there is new alsa out there and my system is inconsistent.

So I typed 'update-manager -d'

and updated my system to latest version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, scheduled to be out in about a Month. Rest of this page tracks what is not working and possible solutions.

First I was very pleasantly surprised by the update process (very simple, not error given), system was updated and while being updated most of the desktop still worked. After update I rebooted (it took a little bit longer than 7.10 but this might just be only a issue of not updating the progress bar) and was presented with working GNOME environment, working evolution, working VPN client, webcam, wifi and sound ;) Just integrated microphone refuses to work. After I got home I discovered couple of more bugs, but something might be because it is not integrated yet (Gnome 2.22 is to be released tomorrow).

Current bugs preventing "THE DISTRO" syndrom:
  • #182284 - slow scrolling of webpages (Xorg going to 100%), seems to be fixed by installing xserver-xorg-video-intel - 2:2.2.1-1ubuntu4
  • #176090 - no LED activity for wifi (Intel iwl3945)
  • #200950 - wifi cannot connect to WPA+WEP based networks, likely bug with WPA supplicant
  • #183968 and #180766 wifi is renamed to wlan0_rename
  • #201326 - Shutdown button does not work
  • #188972 - Integrated microphone does not work
  • #201338 - Evolution crashed with SIGSEV in camel_exchange_journal_delete()

So lets see what mighty ubuntu team can fix before the Hardy Heron is out.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

bye Brussels, FOSDEM, I am back to work

Times flies, weekend in Brussels is over (actually it is Wednesday now already!) and I am back to work. I hardly managed to put some pictures from my Monday's tripping in the city on-line. By checking the google earth measurement feature I managed to walk over 15 kms with more than 14Kg heavy backpack, in the end of day I was looking for any excuse to sit down for a while. PSP is very handy in those moments.

Brussels is very interesting city, de-facto capital of the European Union, hosting many of its key institutions. It also has beautiful wide streets full of any kind of shops one can imagine. It starts to wake up at 10am and tends to live up until late hours in the morning. I had whole Monday to explore the city. This time I skipped Grand Place and Manneken Pis statue as I saw it last time I was there and instead walked the city from Palace of Justice to the St. Mary's Church and then down to central station and from there to Basilica of Sacred Heart, 6th biggest church in the world. I watched the Zeitgeist the evening before, so I find it kinda funny to see all those huge buildings built in the name of God which might actually be just a worshiping of astrology signs. By the way I can recommend Zeitgeist to anyone, very interesting movie, scoring 8.9/10 on imdb, so check it out.

After long time I also managed to get together with a very close friend, so thank you for everything.

FOSDEM'08 was great, as it was my first bigger conference I consider it a huge success. I've met a lot of interesting people, managed to visit a lot of interesting talks and learn new stuff as well. I hope to post some more articles about FOSDEM if time permits. Looking forward to next year. Btw, the GNOME party on Saturday and GNOME people just rocks!

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Going to FOSDEM

I’m going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European MeetingWhile reading my favorite planet I noticed FOSDEM'08 is this week. As I am now living in Copenhagen which is relatively close, flights are cheap and I was always sorry I could not attend any real open source conference and meet the real people behind all this exciting stuff, I decided to go. As the conference is really close (this Friday) I have to act fast. Flights are sorted, now I am looking for some couch/sofa to stay at night, couch surfing seems like a great option. Agenda is really long list of exciting events and I spent whole yesterdays night just to try to pick some of them. There are still overlays but I'll try to sort it out as times permits.

So far I picked those:

Saturday:
10:00 - 10:30 Opening: Welcome
10:30 - 11:30 Opening: Tux with Shades, Linux in Hollywood
11:30 - 12:30 Opening: How a large scale opensource project works
12:30 - 13:15 Opening: Status update of Software Patents
13:30 - 14:15 LPI - LPI 2008 - a certification passage
14:00-14:45 Janson Perl6
14:30 - 15:15 Gnome Gnome Developer Kit
15:15 - 16:00 Gnome More Clutter - Animation Kit
16:00 - 17:00 CentOS Introduction to CentOS
16:15 - 16:30 - openSUSE - Builde Service Overview
16:15 - 16:30 - openSUSE - Builde Service Web interface
16:45 - 17:30 Gnome Elisa
18:15 - 18:45 Gnome GUPnP
18:00 - 19:00 CentOS Pluggable real-time monitoring with dstat


Sunday:
10:00 - 11:00 Chavanne Xen
11:30 - 12:00 openSUSE - Kernel, udev, D-Bus, HAL, NetworkManager and Friends
12:00 - 13:00 openSUSE - Suspend
12:00 - 13:00 X.org - Fixing X input
13:00 - 13:45 CrossDesktop - Farsight 2: Video conferencing made easy
13:00 - 14:00 H.1309 CentOS Introduction to CentOS
14:00 - 15:00 Janson Conary
14:30 - 15:00 openSUSE - One Click Install
15:00 - 15:15 talk - IOGrind: locating I/O performance problems
15:15 - 16:00 CrossDesktop - Deb Packaging Introduciton
15:00 - 15:45 Packaging - PackageKit
16:00 - 17:00 CentOS Hosting custom applications on CentOS 5
16:00 - 16:45 CrossDesktop - GEGL
17:15 - 18:30 Janson The Endgame
17:00 - 18:00 CentOS CentOS 5 and Virtualization


Event is happening at the ULB Campus Solbosh, so I can check what the studies looks like in Belgium. And I see LPI certifications are available, time to test my Linux skills. Now if I just manage my phone to sync to Google calendar, both Goosync and Scheduleworld are not working for me now.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Being a Linux Consultant

Ok, since I'm now traveling a lot I've decided to use this blog to expose some more details of me so those who want can catch up on me. For those who knows Red Dwarf series: Perhaps, in some distance future, on Sunday, I'll be drinking Cognac and reading those bits of my success story, what else better a man can do .)

I'm now working as an Linux Consultant implementing GSM/GPRS/UMTS (network you use when calling and using internet provided by your mobile operator) monitoring system. This means a lot of traveling, meeting a lot of people, installing the system at customer premises, solving any issues that appears and mainly being on your own most of the time. I am all excited about that, it is like being business man without doing that business staff I do not enjoy yet. Implementations last from couple of days to several Months depending on customer and state to work.

It also means wake up at 5:00am, catch up plane, work hard all day long and get dead tired to the hotel (really, yesterday, after walking Oslo for couple of hours I got to the hotel at 6pm and found myself at 2am still dressed up on the sofa), just to find out that my Maestro card is not accepted anywhere in Norway. And since there was Nobel Peace Concert happening that same day in Oslo and I was staying far away from Oslo I had to travel to the Airport to try the cash machine to get some cash. I got lucky.


So I have my new Master Card being ordered at the moment, looking forward what next ten days brings as I'm still going to stay in Norway for that time. And for those thinking Norway is expensive, you are right, Norway is way expensive.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Shell: CDPATH

While in a new job I finally got some time to re-read some basics, like the shell scripting and some UNIX tips and tricks. So today I re-discovered the CDPATH.

I've borrowed the following explanation from somewhere else.

The CDPATH environment variable defines additional locations to be searched when you type the cd command. When you type cd A, cd will look for A in the current directory. If you define the CDPATH environment variable which consists of a list of directories, cd will look for A in the current directory and if it is not found, the search continues in the directories defined in CDPATH, from left to right, stopping at the first place where it is found. Your working directory is then switched to A.

Example:

smol@eclipse:~$ pwd
/home/smol

smol@eclipse:~$ ls
foo bar
smol@eclipse:~$ ls /tmp
baz
smol@eclipse:~$ export CDPATH=/tmp
smol@eclipse:~$ cd baz
/tmp/baz
smol@eclipse:/tmp/baz$


Quite handy, something every UNIX admin likely knows already. Here is some further reading on Bash scripting features.

Bits and bytes of my analog life

Silly title, but what the heck, there are so many changes in my life right now.

Eva: After seven years of living together my girlfriend left me and I feel empty and miserable, I really do. Something is broken in me and I do not know how to fix that.

Work: I've quit my work at DHL. Last four years were excellent when it comes to my professional carrier and I'm really gratefull to DHL for letting me grow. Access to technology one cannot see anywhere else but what I really liked the most was the team of people and the "FUN" of a corporate life we shared. So, Lukas, Pepe, Marketko, Zdendo, Ondreji, Peetee, Honzo, Marku, Petre, Radime and all you many others I forgot to mention, thank you for being so great to me, thank you for being such a great team and friends. I hope we will stay in touch wherever we go.

Work2: And I got a new job. I should say it is a dream job. My current position is Linux Consultant for Denmark/Japanese corporation operating at monitoring field for telco companies all around the world. That means working with open-source technologies, learning more about GSM/GPRS/UMTS networks and lot of traveling and since I'm still below thirty, I'm really looking for that. Recently I had a feeling that my capability to absorb every happening in open-source movement is dropping and I should specialize on a subset of that. So lets try.