Tag: open source

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Ubuntu

I’ve been playing around with Fedora 7 on Selene, my Thinkpad X22, and I must say I was disappointed. Hibernate and standby didn’t work. Not even with Software Suspend 2. I consider those two to be critical features for a notebook so their not working just won’t do. Upon the recommendation of Alex, I installed Ubuntu 7 Feisty Fawn. Well what do you know? Almost everything, including hibernate and standby, “just works” as advertised out of the box. The two things I noticed didn’t work is the sound and the PCMCIA WiFi. Sound is not critical and the PCMCIA WiFi card is a 3rd party device so it’s no big deal. I like Red Hat and Fedora but does Ubuntu rock! I think I’m a convert.

UPDATE: Alex logged on to Selene and fixed the sound and the WiFi. Thanks man!

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Undetectable USB Devices in Linux

Finally was able to find a solution to the problem that had been bugging the Linux laptops at the office for quite some time already. The problem was that USB devices were not being detected. The error messages go like:

USB: device not accepting address 2. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 3. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 4. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 5. Error -110
Unlink after no-IRQ? Controller is probably using the wrong IRQ

After quite a bit of searching. I finally found this thread. It turns out that the solution is quite simple. You’ll need to go open your boot loader configuration file (in my case it’s /boot/grub/grub.conf) and put irqpoll as one of the kernel parameters. Reboot and voila! USB devices are now detected.

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ImageMagick and JMagick on Linux

INSTALL IMAGEMAGICK
Download libwmf-0.2.8.4-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh libwmf-0.2.8.4-1.i386.rpm
Download ImageMagick-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh ImageMagick-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm

INSTALL IMAGEMAGICK-DEVEL
yum install ghost-script-devel
Download ImageMagick-devel-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh ImageMagick-devel-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm

INSTALL JMAGICK
yum install libtiff-devel
yum install libjpeg-devel
Download JMagick-6.2.4-0.tar.gz
tar xvfz JMagick-6.2.4-0.tar.gz
cd JMagick-6.2.4-0
./configure (or. ./configure –with-java-home=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.03)
make all
make test
make javadoc
vi Make.def
Find INSTALL and change the value to /root/JMagick-6.2.4-0/install-sh
make install

To use JMagick, libJMagick.so must be in a directory where the runtime loader can find it or you must set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH. jmagick.jar must be in your Java class path.

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Thinkpad Rebirth

Selene, my trusty little IBM Thinkpad X22 died last wednesday. At first I thought it was Windows’ fault. It turned out later that it was the hard disk’s. I buy a new 40GB Seagate Momentus hard disk and what do I get? A catastrophic failure after just a few months’ use. Grrr. It’s a good thing I still have the original 20GB IBM Travelstar hard disk.

A hard disk failure is always a traumatic experience to me (and I’ve had quite a few). This is mainly because I don’t backup as diligently as others(?). I think about the gigabytes of data that can’t be recovered. Most of these is probably clutter and will probably be completely forgotten a few weeks later. But when you’re in the middle of the disaster you can’t help but feel this deep sense of loss :P But what has happened has happened and all you can really do is to pick up the pieces best you can and get things together and up again.

So I tried installing Linux Fedora Core 4. Wishing that this more robust operating system could save me from future grief. Although it was not Windows’ fault, I was thinking maybe it contributed >:) Besides, I’ve used Linux before. On my servers and, for one lengthy period, as a desktop OS. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to. On my first attempt, a power management and hot-plugging wouldn’t work. I tried again with the same results. What’s a notebook without power management? I decided to give up on Linux (for the time being) and went back to Windows 2000.

After installing Windows 2000, I found out I didn’t have the drivers as the recovery partition was also trashed. Except one: for the Linksys WPC54G Wireless PCMCIA card. So I installed it and logged on to IBM/Lenovo to download the other drivers. I did a search and got a download link for a software installer which I promptly downloaded and ran. Lo and behold, it searched IBM/Lenovo for all the drivers and other software I need (and also those I don’t really need) and asked me which ones I want. I selected them all, started the download, and left it overnight. This morning the files were all waiting for me and with a click of a mouse button, they started installing. Pretty painless and quick. IBM/Lenovo rocks!

And thus my Thinkpad was reborn.

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Tomcat 5 on Fedora Core 3

There are quite a few ways to go about this but one of the better (though not necessarily the easiest) is to use JPackage. On their website, it says that the JPackage Project has two primary goals:

  • To provide a coherent set of Java software packages for Linux, satisfying all quality requirements of other applications.
  • To establish an efficient and robust policy for Java software installation.

Now that is exactly what I’m looking for.

SETUP JPACKAGE
cd ~
wget http://jpackage.org/jpackage.asc
wget http://jpackage.org/jpackage.repo
su
rpm –import jpackage.asc
mv jpackage.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
exit

SETUP RPM BUILDING
mkdir ~/rpms
cd ~/rpms
mkdir {tmp,build,rpms,sources,specs,srpms}

Put the following into .rpmmacros in your home directory:
%_topdir %(echo /home/jay/rpms)
%_tmppath %{_topdir}/tmp
%_builddir %{_topdir}/build
%_rpmdir %{_topdir}/rpms
%_sourcedir %{_topdir}/sources
%_specdir %{_topdir}/specs
%_srcrpmdir %{_topdir}/srpms

BUILD THE RPMS FOR REQUIRED NON-FREE PACKAGES JDK AND JTA
Get the JDK files from Sun: jdk-1_5_0_03-linux-i586.bin (not jdk-1_5_0_03-linux-i586-rpm.bin!)
cp jdk-1_5_0_03-linux-i586.bin ~/rpms/sources
Get the JDK source rpm from jpackage
rpm -Uvh java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.03-1jpp.nosrc.rpm
cd ~/rpms/specs
rpmbuild -ba java-1.5.0-sun.spec
Get the JTA files from Sun: jta-1_0_1B-classes.zip and jta-1_0_1B-doc.zip
cp jta-1_0_1B-classes.zip jta-1_0_1B-doc.zip ~/rpms/sources
Get the JTA source rpm from jpackage
rpm -Uvh jta-1.0.1-0.b.4jpp.nosrc.rpm
cd ~/rpms/specs
rpmbuild -ba jta.spec

INSTALL SOME DEPENDENCIES FOR JDK*
su
yum install xorg-x11-deprecated-libs
yum install xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel
yum install unixODBC
yum install unixODBC-devel
exit
*Theoretically not necessary if you use yum to install JDK

INSTALL JDK AND JTA
cd ~/rpms/rpms/i586
su
rpm -Uvh *
cd ~/rpms/rpms/noarch
rpm -Uvh *
exit

AND FINALLY INSTALL TOMCAT5
su
yum install tomcat5
yum install tomcat5-admin-webapps
yum install tomcat5-webapps
exit

Fedora Core 4 came out today though. Maybe all this hocus pocus is no longer needed.