Midnight and the MacBook

At least one cat approves of my new computer.

Or is it the dustcover?

The MacBook does not appear to give out much heat, but perhaps it is more discernible to Midnight. But then again, she now has her Snooza Cuddler.

electronic design challenge

If you have an electronic design in the pipeline that is environmentally friendly, you may wish to consider entering Farnell’s live edge competition (Electronic Design for the Global Environment). First prize is $50,000 cash plus in-kind support for expert design, legal, and marketing consultancy.

Judging criteria include but not limited to; effect on the environment, efficiency of energy use, compliance with the RoHS Directive, and end of life considerations as well as the usual good design decisions.

The competition is international, but all entries must be in English. Registration of interest is due by 31October 2007 with the closing date for submitting designs being 30 November 2007.

Note: I am in no way connected with the competition or its sponsors. I just read the web address (www.live-edge.com) from a delivery docket that came with some parts today from Farnell. The competition opened 15 May 2007.

Etch from scratch - join the audio group and get sound

Debian just works. Sometimes though, the emphasis on ‘just’ is somewhat diminished as I expect this very comprehensive and ‘you can do anything’ operating system to meet my personal expectations. I know now that just as I cannot mind-read (not yet anyway), my computer does not know what it is required to do without me telling or informing it.

Computer sound or audio is not required, if not unwelcome in a workplace. This is the only reason I can think of why when I installed the Xfce version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) , that sound is not automatically configured.

If you do not have sound on your computer and you want it, then the first things to check are:

• speakers or headphones are connected and turned on
• volume is turned up
• your username belongs to the audio groupCheck by opening a terminal and type:
  groupsThis will list the groups that you belong to.
• If ‘audio’ is not listed, then add yourself to this group. To do this, again in a terminal, become superuser to enter:
  addgroup username audio

If you still do not hear audio, I would be checking that my sound card is supported, and if there are any specific requirements for the player or game that I wish to play.

Note: To list all the available groups, in a terminal enter:
cat /etc/group

twisting wires together

//engtech has listed their favourite quotes from “Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry” edited by Susan Lammers (paperback available from Amazon).

This quote caught my eye:

“Programming is the ultimate field ofr someone who likes to tinker. Tinkering requires tools. Electrical engineers have various components they can put together to build something. But they’re constrained by the availability of physical equipment. With a computer, if you can think about it, you can do it. You can design your own tools or create the parts as you go along. If you don’t like something, you can just change it or rewrite it. It’s a wide-open tool box, given the resource, the computer. The only limiting factors are the amount of time it takes the computer to do the task and the amount of time it takes you to write the program.” Ray Ozzie, P188

I think electronics engineers have the best of both worlds. They can tinker on both hardware and software by developing hardware that a computer can talk to and listen for through standard protocols, for example, USB. They are not limited by the hardware environment of their computer, and can build on any hardware that they design.

My favourite quote is from my partner:

“I used to just twist wires together ..
now the wires are so small I use software”

Etch from scratch - installing Adobe Acrobat Reader

Update (22 November 2007) Thanks to readers who leave comments (see below), I now know that there is a .deb available from Adobe. But if you are using Debian, then you may find www.debian-multimedia.org more useful (thanks H), as you can place an appropriate mirror site in your /etc/apt/sources.list for use by apt-get. Note: Remember to run apt-get update if you change your sources.list file.

On Debian GNU/Linux (Sarge) I can use Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0.10 or Xpdf, and most often I use Acrobat Reader. Xpdf was great for viewing simple PDF documents, but I tended to use Acrobat Reader if I was viewing and printing longer or more complex PDF documents.

I was beginning to experience difficulty displaying some PDF documents (black boxes for images and ill-formed fonts) with both PDF viewers. Also, not being able to print more than one copy of a PDF at a time from Acrobat Reader was becoming cumbersome.

Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.9 on my new Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) system was straight forward. But it has not been included in the Debian package management system, so it is another piece of software that I need to keep track of separately. I do this in a log book of the paper variety and in a file called admin-log located in the root home directory.

Since researching how to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader, I have read LWN’s article about a ‘phone home’ feature in Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 that logs when you view tagged PDF documents with a company over the internet. This article is over two years old, and whether this is still an issue or feature in Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.9, I’m not sure. H tried to persuade me to use Evince, which was tempting as I can just use apt-get, and I may still do this if I can find evidence that Adobe Acrobat Reader still includes the ‘phone home’ feature.

This is my experience of installing Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.9.

1. As root in a terminal, ran apt-cache search acroread

This is because Adobe Acrobat Reader on my Debian Sarge system was called ‘acroread’. I did not find ‘acroread’, so tried other key words such as ‘PDF’ and ‘reader’ without success.

2. Displayed the /etc/apt/sources.list file to check that an ‘etch contrib non-free’ repository had been included in my sources list. And I do have such a repository listed.
3. Adobe Acrobat Reader did not appear to be in any Debian repositories that I had listed in my sources list, so I decided to download Acrobat Reader from Adobe. For Linux, they offered Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.9 as a tar.gz and .rpm. I downloaded AdobeReader_enu-7.0.9-1.i386.tar.gz.
4. I use the Desktop as a scratch or temporary area, so I moved the downloaded file to this directory and unpacked using:

tar xvzf AdobeReader_enu-7.0.9-1.i386.tar.gz

AdobeReader folder on the desktop is displayed containing the following files:
COMMON.TAR
ILINXR.TAR
INSTALL
LICREAD.TXT
ReadMe.htm

5. I displayed ReadMe.htm in my browser and read that the INSTALL script would install Acrobat Reader in a /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0 directory.
6. I navigated to the AdobeReader directory, and ran:
   ./INSTALL

The following is what was displayed in my terminal (including my responses in bold) as I ran the installation script:

This installation requires 111 MB of free disk space.

Enter installation directory for Adobe Reader 7.0.9 [/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0] <- Pressed Enter key to accept the default directory

Directory “/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0″ does not exist.
Do you want to create it now? [y] y
/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0

Installing platform independent files … Done

Installing platform dependent files … Done

Do you want to install the browser plugin ? [y/n] y

This will install the browser plugin for acroread.

Do you want to perform automatic installation ? [y/n] y

Trying to install plugin for browser - firefox
Installing plugin in /usr/lib/iceweasel/iceweasel
Installation successful. /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/nppdf.so

Trying to install plugin for browser - mozilla
Installing plugin in /usr/lib/iceweasel/iceweasel
The plugin seems to be already installed. Are you sure you want to overwrite ? [y/n] n
Installation cancelled.

Finished with automatic install.
Do you want to perform manual installation ? [y/n] n

If you are facing any problem in getting the installation to work for your browser, please copy the following file to the plugin folder of the browser:
/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so

In case of difficulties please refer to the documentation provided along with the browser for addition of new plugins.
Please login again for changes to MIME types and icons to take effect.

7. I navigated to where the binary was installed, i.e. /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin and checked that I could start Adobe Acrobat Reader with:
   ./acroread

I was able to successfully start Acrobat Reader.

8. I navigated to /usr/local/bin (the directory where I usually install applications outside of the Debian package manager), and created a symbolic link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader binary:

ln -s /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin/acroread acroread

This means that any user on my computer can run Adobe Acrobat Reader without having to add the Adobe specific path to their environment variables.

Later, if I wish to uninstall Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.9, all that I have to do is remove the directory and files in /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/, and the symbolic link that I have created.

For the moment, I can view PDFs, which I need to do to be able to get on with my current assignment, but I’ll research other PDF viewers when I’m more at leisure. So if any of the PDFs that I’m viewing are suitably tagged, yes, the PDF publishers will know that I am reading up on the health and medical areas of nanotechnology.

Etch from scratch - installing a printer

Although, I can create a postscript file for printing later, I thought it would be better if I introduced the office printer to my new Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) box. The ‘touch it once’ way of getting the tedious paperwork out the way.

Before I got onto installing a printer though, I tweaked:

• the /etc/apt/sources.list to remove “deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 xfce-CD Binary-1 20070407-12:12]/ etch contrib main”, and
• configured both Xfce Panel 1 and Xfce Panel 2 to autohide using the Panel Manager. To figure out which panel is which, look for the panel location on the screen. Mmm.

Then, H respectfully requested that I install ssh so that he could have access to my computer So I ran apt-get install ssh.

My screen is still going grainy and I am unable to select some options when back at the log in screen. It may be that the driver that has been selected is not appropriate. For now, I just swap to another terminal, become root and powerdown.

I’m getting used to the fonts in some applications, but they are still yuck overall. I needed to get on with work and this included being able to print from the browser for online banking, so further tweaks have to wait.

1. Located the Foomatic printer configuration tool on the Xfce Apps > Tools menu, and followed my nose knowing that I have a networked HP Color Laserjet 4500 to install.

Unfortunately, the following message is displayed:

‘Unable to retrieve PPD file from PPD/HP/color_laser/HP_Color_Laserjet_4500.ppd’

Thought, ok, I believe you. So:

2. apt-get install linuxprinting.org-ppds, and
3. apt-get install hp-ppd

H also remembered that additional ppds were required on the Computer Angels system.

Appeared to work, in that I successfully added a printer. However, no test page appeared when requested.

4. I followed up H’s suggestion of installing CUPS with:apt-get install gnome-cups-manager
5. I was unable to print a test page from GNOME CUPS Manager, so I used my browser to display the CUPS web interface at https://localhost:631/ and successfully printed a test page from there.

I also printed a page displayed in my browser and started OpenOffice.org Writer and typed in a few words to check that I could print from there. And I can So ok for uni assignments next week.

Etch from scratch - monitor flickering

Initial installation of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) correctly detected the Radeon RV280 (9200 PRO) and selected the appropriate Radeon driver.

However, the monitor flickers and the Xfce Display Manager crashes. I’m logged out of my session if I try to select other resolutions. Also, noise is displayed when I moved the mouse pointer at the log in screen.

Ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and instead of manually selecting Radeon (I did this the first few times), I went with the ‘autoselect’ option. ATI was autodetected, so I went through the prompts accepting the defaults, until I got to ‘Medium’ intervention. I don’t know enough about my monitor (VX720) to take advantage of the options in the offered ‘Advanced’ intervention.

Success.

Now able to change resolution using the Xfce Display Manager, and have decided on a resolution of 1280×1024x75 for now. The fonts still look yuck, so I may have to pop over to the Computer Angels Sarge install to see what fonts are used there.

Get Flocked

I tried, really I did.

So keen was I to try Flock, it was the next piece of software for me to install on my new Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) system.

The download and installation was easy. It was beginning to use it for the very thing that I wanted it to work, i.e. blogging that has got me stumped. It must be something really simple, but I’m just not getting it at the moment.

I tried to get my new system ready in time for the Flock Community Test Day yesterday, but I thought it was better to tweak and fine tune things like monitor flickering and installing a printer. And no, it didn’t take me all day and night to do these things, but I did have things like work and assignments to do in the meantime, some of which required a working computer. But I still downloaded the Test Day Build to play with, even though I missed the day to do the testing together with the Flock Community.

1. Downloaded flock-0.8.0.99.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz to my desktop.
2. From a terminal, as root, copied the downloaded file to the /usr/local/bin directory.
3. Unpacked the file:
   tar xvf flock-0.8.0.99.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz
4. Navigated to newly created flock directory as myself, i.e. not root, and attempted to run Flock:
   ./flock

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that a pre-requisites is libstdc++5. Fortunately, the error message was accurate:

“./flock-bin error while loading shared libraries, libstdc++.so.5 cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.”

5. Entering apt-cache search libstdc++ in a terminal showed that the missing file is available to be installed.
6. dpkg -L 'libstdc++*' showed that libstdc++6 is desired and installed.

My question to H was whether I could have both libstdc++5 and libstdc++6 installed. He wasn’t sure, so I went off Googling and found some other people that had a similar if not the same problem but with a different application, and sometimes on a different system. The suggested fix was to install libstdc++5 in addition to libstdc++6.

7. Entering apt-get install libstdc++5 in a terminal showed that gcc-3.3-base and libstdc++5 would be installed and nothing else would be upgraded or deleted. I went ahead and installed libstdc++5.

It worked, I can now run ./flock from a terminal to start Flock.

That was the easy bit.

The first things that I wanted to do were to introduce Flock to this blog and create a post. I found the Help > Getting Started on the menu bar, and the User Guide is also online.

Help on configuring Flock to work with WordPress.com says:

To configure your browser to work with an existing blog service:

* On Windows, choose Accounts and Services from the Tools menu.
* On Linux, choose Accounts and Services from the Edit menu.
* On Mac, choose Accounts and Services from the Flock menu.

The ‘Accounts and Services’ panel is displayed within Flock on the left side of the screen.

The Help continues:

1. Click the Blogging button on the top menu bar.
2. Click the Accounts tab.
3. Click the Add Blog button.

I cannot locate the Blogging button on the top menu bar. My top menu bar shows:

File | Edit | View | History | Favorites | Tools | Help

I selected the ‘Blogging’ heading in the ‘Accounts and Services’, followed by the ‘WordPress.com’ button that is displayed below the heading. The http://wordpress.com/ site is displayed in the main window panel. Note: The mouseover ‘WordPress.com’ button displays “WordPress blogging service. Select to enable blogging to WordPress with …”.

Have you ever felt that when you share or explain an issue and in doing so you figure it out? I think I may have found the Blogging button. When I mouseover a button displaying a quill pen (on what I would call a button bar) the popup reads “Create a blog post”. When I click this button it rightly tells me that I need a Blog Account. I’ll investigate this further when I have more time to play.

Etch from scratch - installing Flash Player

I found the installation of Adobe Flash Player relatively straight forward.

The steps I followed to install Adobe Flash Player 9 onto my freshly made Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) box using Xfce were:

1. Download install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz from Adobe.
2. The web instructions said to “Save the .tar.gz file to your desktop and wait for the file to download completely.”

I’ve never had a desktop before on my Linux box, so I went and had a closer look. Not only do I have a desktop, but there are already ‘things’ on it - Trash, Home, and File System. Oh well, something else to tidy up later. In the meantime, I downloaded the linux.tar.gz file to the desktop.

3. I then opened a terminal to unpack the downloaded file to the desktop with:
   tar xvzf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gzA install_flash_player_9_linux folder on the desktop is displayed containing the following files:

   - flashplayer-installer
   - flashplayer.xpt
   - libflashplayer.so
   - Readme.txt



4. The web instructions then to say to “navigate to this directory” and run the installer. That is:
   ./flashplayer-installerI was a little hesitant to do this at first, as I use the Debian package manager (apt), but I was too lazy to view the flashplayer-installer script to find out what it was going to do, especially where it was going to place files.
5. I was prompted to shut down my browser, which I did. When the script completed, it displayed the message:”NOTE: Please ask your administrator to remove the xpti.dat from the components directory of the Mozilla or Netscape browser.”I did not find xpti.dat in the Mozilla browser components directory, in my case the /usr/lib/iceweasel/components directory, but I did find it in my .mozilla/firefox/userprofile directory.After investigating the ./flashplayer-installer script later, H suggested that it may because the BROWSERDIR environment variable was not set.
6. Anyway, now I was at the step to check that it was the Flash Player was installed correctly. The web site said to “launch Mozilla and choose Help > About Plug-ins from the browser menu.”

I don’t have a “Help > About Plug-ins” menu item. Instead, I found Iceweasel’s mention of the Flash Player as file types in the ‘Download Actions’ dialog window displayed by choosing “Manage” alongside the “File Types: Consider how Iceweasel handles certain types of file” label displayed in the Contents Preferences dialog window (Edit > Preferences > Contents).

7. The real test was visiting Charlotte’s Web site. Oh oh, can see the moving pictures, but no sound
8. Visited www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/ to confirm that 9.031.0 is installed.

So not having sound, must be something else. I said this out loud, and H remembered from implementing the Computer Angels system, that to use services on my computer, I had to belong to various groups.

9. Back to my terminal became superuser to enter:
   addgroup username audio

Re-visiting the Charlotte’s Web site confirmed that sound was now working. Yay.

H ‘mentioned’ that I had installed Adobe Flash Player only for myself. So off I went to see how to install it site wide on my ‘personal’ computer. This was as simple as copying the libflashplayer.so file from my .mozilla/firefox/userprofile directory to /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins. Logging in as H to my computer confirmed that the Flash Player was working for a user other than myself. I also added H to the audio group.

There were a couple of installation steps that could have tripped me along the way. This is mostly due to the fact that the documentation included on the download page and in the readme did not describe accurately what I was seeing on my computer. But with some Googling, and thinking through the usual software installation steps I was able to install the Flash Player 9 successfully.

Etch from scratch

Last night I decided to install Etch from scratch on some spare partitions on my computer.

I had little reason to ‘upgrade’, as my computer system allows me to do my work and university assignments, and play a little. But, a few months ago I visited Charlotte’s Web, and I was disappointed that I could not play the movie trailer. Then I visited some other sites, mainly browsing, and I was unable to view their flashy sites too, and then I could not view the images in a newsletter (PDF 5.2 Mb). I put it down to badly designed web sites and newsletters (PDF), but it began to happen more frequently, that it became an irritation.

I did consider upgrading my Computer Angels system, but I decided to install Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) from scratch, and will return to my Computer Angels Sarge system and play with upgrading various applications once I’m happy with the new install.

This is what I did in preparation:

1. I wasn’t sure whether to mount and share my existing /home directory or create a new /home directory, so I created some DVD backups of the directories that I consider important. This is in addition to the daily backup of my complete /home directory.
2. While I downloaded debian-40r0-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso from a local Debian repository, I made two lists from my Sarge install; frequently used programmes, and infrequently used programmes.
3. Created a bootable CD from the .iso file that I downloaded AFTER I checked the md5sum.
4. Checked that my computer was set to boot from the CD.
5. Left the CD in the CD tray and re-booted my computer.

My Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) install was unremarkable (thank you Debian). I was able to click through the prompts and accepting most if not all the defaults. I used two partitions. One for the operating system and programmes and the other as home. The only tricky question was knowing where I was going to obtain subsequent security patches or updates, i.e. what entry did I want in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. H checked his hosts file, and typed this in for me. Note: The reason why we had to doubly make sure is because the downloads were no longer ‘free’, i.e. they add to our download limits.

The Xfce panel that was installed as part of a fresh install of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) does not include Mozilla Thunderbird. The Xfce panel includes an application menu (also available from the workspace menu), terminal, text editor, file manager, and browser. I’ve already been told that this is because I have access to the internet, and I can apt-get whatever I want to use. So, the first application I grabbed was Icedove aka Thunderbird.

I went about setting up my email accounts in Icedove, but then recognised that they were not being displayed in the order that I preferred. Rather than starting over, I mounted my Sarge /home partition and copied over to my new Etch /home the .mozilla-thunderbird directory. Later, when I realised I wanted my bookmarks from the browser, I copied over the .mozilla directory for use by Iceweasel aka Firefox.

My first impression is that installing Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 from scratch is relatively easy. But I recognise that what has made it easier for me is that I have existing hardware that I know works with Debian Sarge and applications or programmes that work in their way.

It has only taken a few hours over two days to appreciate the effort, experience and skills offered freely by the volunteers that developed the Computer Angels computer system (Debian GNU/Linux Sarge). There is a lot more to an effective and cohesive computer system than the hardware and having access to the programmes from the internet.

The two configuration issues that I will have a look at next are:

• installing Adobe Flash Player from Adobe
• video problems - noise that causes a crash/logout and flickering monitor that hurts my eyes