Chris Johnston

The current semester and the school year are almost over so look for increased news and some updates to the website and the code base as well. I can’t wait to start playing with ColdFusion again and see what else I can add to this site. In addition, I am seriously thinking about a redesign. The current design has been up for almost two years and is starting to look a little old.

Also keep your ears open for a program that I am about to start work on in the next little while. I can’t say anything more about it, except that when it is done, it should be a really cool example of a Flash RIA. Guess I should come up with a code name?

I am planning on changing my Linux server. I would use upgrading, but it just doesn’t seem like the right word. Anyway, I am planning on installing Red Hat 9 over the current install of Mandrake 9.2. Hence the reason that upgrade just doesn’t seem right.

The reason behind this is compatibility. I want to do some playing around with Oracle, ColdFusion MX 6.1, Tomcat (and potentially JBoss) and possibily JRun and all of these products just work better on Red Hat than they do on Mandrake. In addition, there are instructions and tutorials on how to get Oracle 9i Release 2 installed on RH 9 and nothing for installing it onto MDK 9.2.

In addition to the above web and database packages, I am also going to be setting up file sharing (hopefully using the new Samba 3.0). Along with remote access through SSH and ftp and trying my best to secure the whole thing.

The point of this announcement is that I am going to try my best to document the entire process. I want to put up on this site all the directions necessary for anyone to repeat my install. Hopefully, this will allow for some excellent tutorials on installing the above packages along with some tutorials on networking and getting Linux to play nice within a windows network.

So, things to look for in the future.

After what has seemed to be a very long weekend, FuzzyLizard is finally back online. The problem seems to lie with F2o, my hosting company, but I have no details as to what the problem actually was. Here’s hoping they have it fixed. These outages are hard to take.

It is amazing what a little RAM can do for a computer. I just upgraded my notebook by installing some new ram. The computer went from 256megs to 640 megs of ram. And I can actually see a difference. The whole thing just runs a lot smoother when multiple applications are open. The moral of all this, if you are buying a notebook, make sure you get it with a minimum of 512 megs of ram.

I wrote about this software about two years ago as a Linux substiture for MSN Messenger. This app has only gotten better during that time period.

This little program recreates almost all of msn messenger 6.1′s functionality on Linux. Not only does it work with Microsoft’s new protocol, but it even supports the little icons/pictures that people use when chatting. This thing is incredible.

One of the problem with amsn two years ago was that there was a bug in the install under Mandrake. With this version, that is a thing of the past. Simply go to the site, download the Mandrake specific rpm and install away. Not only will the program install properly, but it also adds a menu option on the kde menu.

There is one dependency and that is that you need ImageMagick in order to use the picture option. However, most distro’s either install this as part of a standard install or at least include it on the CD’s so it should be available.

in addition, under KDE, if you have the right devel packages on your computer, you can compile a little system tray/docking applet/icon thing that allows you to minimize the program and still see what is going on.

Another cool feature is that if you are unable to install software into anything except your home directoy, then simply download the bin file and run it from inside your home directory. This works great for me at school.

Software

I just couldn’t resist. Mandrake 10 Community Edition came out and I just had to try and install it onto my notebook. Mandrake releases demand to be tried and I happily submitted. However, that is about as far as the happiness went. The entire install was a disaster right from the beginning.I had Mandrake 9.2 up and running on my notebook with only two small gliches. So why I thought I needed to install Mandrake 10 is beyond me. However, I did and it failed. Here is what happened.

Initial Install
Things started going wrong from the moment that I put the disk in it seemed. I was apparently one of the lucky ones, my install was able to boot off the first CD. For many people, they have not even been able to get this far. (The trick to this problem is to boot off the second CD) The initial boot sequence was normal enough, however, when it came time to start the actual install, it suffered some kind of fatal error and I was left with a text based install. Not a good beginning. So I muddled my way through this and was able to get everything installed. The first big hurdle was out of the way.

The second hurdle was to fix the video. By now I am used to having to do this, so this was actually an easy step. With the video fixed, it was time to finally login and explore this new release.

Exploring Mandrake 10.0 – The Problems
This is where the real problems started to show themselves. I quickly discovered that the functionality that I am used to with my touchpad is not supported in the 2.6.3 kernel that Mandrake uses. This meant no tap-click. This was a little annoying, but liveable (I guess).

The second thing that I discovered was that I had no interent connection. This is where the real fun began. I have two network cards on my notebook, a wired bcm 100Bt card and a Linksys WMP11 802.11b wireless card. Getting the bcm card up and running was a snap. However, the boot had failed to recognize my pcmcia card, and so it was not even turned on. Time to reboot the computer. During the reboot, the wireless card was found and I was able to configure it. Great so far.

I had to reboot the computer for some reason and during that reboot, a message came up saying that the wireless card had been removed. This started a pattern. Every boot I would have to reconfigure one or both of my network cards. I later discovered that this was because I had Hot-plug enabled for the cards. During a second install I turned this feature off, however I ran into even more problems during that install.

No ACPI
Probably the biggest problem I found with Mandrake 10 Community Edition was that it did not support acpi. This is something that Mandrake 9.2 setup automagically during the install. Due to the way that I use my notebook, and the fact that it is not always plugged in, I depend on acpi to know what state my battery is in. I can not live without. Nor should I. If Linux is going to consider itself a real operating system, then it should support acpi out of the box. This was not the case with mdk 10.0 CE.

This lead me to compiling a separate kernel with acpi support included. My first attempt at this went fine. Accept that the kernel config file that I was using had removed devfs, something that Mandrake, apparently, still uses. This resulted in me not being able to access my Cd drive or my wireless card. I attempted to compile the kernel and include devfs support and this hosed the entire install.

Conclusion
There has been a lot of talk lately about the fact that the Community Editon is not the Final release. From my experience, this must be true. I do not think that I have had this much trouble installing a Linux distro since my very first install four years ago. I have come to expect a certain amount of ease when installing Mandrake and this version did not live up to that expectation.

I am not ready to write off Mandrake quite yet. I am going to wait a few months and see how much improved Mandrake 10 Final is over 10 Community Editon. Hopefully, they will have all the bugs ironed out and it will once again be a smooth install. However, for anyone thinking of installing Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition, I would stronly advise you to wait. Especially if you are thinking of installing it onto a notebook, and a Dell Inspiron 1100 in particular.

P.S. I am now back up and running on Mandrake 9.2 once again.

Here is yet another little article in my continueing series of installing various Linux distros onto my inspiron 1100 notebook.

For school I have to do a project using a rather odd language called Pliant which only really runs well under Linux. However, after the dismal failure of trying to install SUSE onto my notebook, my computer has been sans linux. So, in order to finish this assignment, I once again needed to install a version of Linux. My all-time favourite distro is Mandrake, so I decided to give that a shot. After a somewhat interesting install, I was able to get everything up and working, with the exception of the wired network card and sound.

Much of the credit for the easy install must be given to this website. I don’t think I would ever have installed any version of linux without the tips and tricks included within it. For the most part, the install is exactly like it is described on the site above so I won’t include the details here. If you are interested, just give the above site a read.

However, I will mention some oddities that are unique to Mandrake. The first is that during the install, all you will see is the centre of each install screen. However, if you move the mouse around, you are able to see all the hidden parts as well. This means that if there is something you need access to off screen, it is available. This became incredibly important when I was trying to install the video patch.

Unlike Red Hat, which either decreases the resolution or decreases the colour depth, Mandrake creates a virtual desktop that is larger than the viewable area. This means that in order to access what you can not see on screen, you only have to move the mouse to the edge of the screen and the screen will start to slide in that direction. It actually takes a little getting used to, but does allow you to veiw the entire 1024×768 screen (just not all at once).

In total, I only have two remaining problems. The first is that I don’t think the broadcom network card is configured correctly (although I have not thoroughly tested this) and I have no sound. This last issue is not a big concern since I only use the linux install for programming in Pliant and I listen to tunes on my iPod.

All in all, I am quite happy with the way that this install went. I think I will be leaving Mandrake 9.2 on my laptop till at least school is done and I don’t need it anymore for my assignment.