Tag: software

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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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Firefox 3.0 (Gran Paradiso) Alpha 3

As long as you haven’t been living under a rock these past few years you should have at least heard of Firefox. If you have heard of it but haven’t switched yet, here are some very good reasons. I have done so (from IE to Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox) and have no regrets. But, just to be on the bleeding edge, I downloaded the alpha 3 release of Firefox 3.0 aka Gran Paradiso. It’s supposedly just alpha, not final, not eve beta. The developers nor I do not recommend using it due to possible instability. But I must say that  after hours and hours of using it, I have encountered no crashes or bugs whatsoever. Looks like 3rd time is a charm. If so, since this is also going to be its third major release, Firefox 3.0 is sure to rock!

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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.