It took me 3 days to install ubuntu

My father bought a new laptop for his shop, the Acer Aspire ES 14 (ES1-432-C9B6). He's been using ubuntu on all his computers for a long time now and asked me to install ubuntu on his latest laptop. And oh my God... it was so difficult....

Installing it was easy enough... just boot the usb installer and follow the wizard. But after that, it would say "No bootable device". I tried changing all the settings in the bios. But there wasn't a lot of settings. And no settings for uefi.. only for secure boot. And even the secure boot menu was disabled until you set the supervisor password. But even after toggling the secure boot option, it still won't boot.

Been googling to find the solution but not much luck, until I found this page, with the title "Fix No Bootable Device Found Error After Installing Ubuntu" I thought my luck has changed. But alas, his solution required that we choose the uefi file to boot from, which again, was not available as a menu in the bios.

And then I found this on the ubuntu forums. At the very end it mentions about how to add the UEFI entry with rEFind and linked to this page. The page actually teach you step by step on how to use rEFInd to add the ubuntu grub into uefi without going through the BIOS menu. You just need to:
1. download it from here
2. dd the image into a pen drive
3. boot the pen drive
4. enter the rEFInd UEFI shell
5. Type :- bcfg boot dump" to get a list of all available boot drive
6. Type :- bcfg boot add X fs0:\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi "ubuntu"
    where X is changed with the next available number from step 5
7. Type :- bcfg boot mv 1 0
     to change the boot order
8. Restart

And it should be working great now.... finally..

Back into Gnome 3

It has been quite a while since I've last used Gnome 3. The thing which I especially didn't like was starting an application by browsing the menu feels like a whole lot more cumbersome, mainly because it'll take the whole page filled with huge icons to do it and I didn't like how when you press alt-tab all the apps are grouped together kind of thing. So with a mind to get back to gnome 2, I switched my arch machine to use linux mint.

But guess what? Even linux mint is moving to gnome 3 with it's upcoming release 12. Except it'll have a bunch of customization which keeps your workflow more the less the same. And not only that, it's even easy now to install the gnome-shell in ubuntu 11.10. So since now almost everyone is on that bandwagon, I might as well get on it myself.

I've bought myself a spanking new laptop recently and thought that'd be a good candidate for a new start on gnome 3. At first I thought maybe I'll try fedora first (I've always been unlucky with fedora for some reason). Since the new laptop already comes with Windows 7 and I wanted to dual boot anyway in case there might be situation where I might want to use windows, I wanted the installer to automatically resize the partition and install it side-by-side. But alas, my bad luck streak with fedora continues as trying to use the installer to resize the partition gives an error. I've forgotten exactly what the error was, but after 3 attempts at it, I said, well maybe I'll try something else. Burned an ubuntu cd and a few minutes later I've finished installing ubuntu 11.10 side-by-side with windows resizing the partition just using the installer. Sweeeeeeeet.. :) And one 'sudo apt-get install gnome-shell' and I'm in the game again. Oh, looked at unity a bit again first before installing gnome-shell, still don't quite like it.

One thing that I approach differently now when using gnome 3 is don't think so much of using it menus style, use it gnome-do style. Press the super key (that's windows key for those who don't know :) and just type a few letters of the app you want to start. Things I usually use like terminal and firefox usually come up right in front so it's really just pressing around 3 keys (super, f, enter). Apart from that I've wrapped my head around the idea of using the alt-tab and alt-"key above tab" for jumping between windows of the same app. So it's getting a whole lot more acceptable now. I might even convert my main desktop back to arch or something once I have the time. Starting to really like using gnome 3 again.

Redmine is awesome

Been trying out a new issue tracker at work, it's called Redmine. In ubuntu just need to do an:

sudo apt-get install redmine redmine-mysql

Then once that is installed add the following line to /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf

PassengerDefaultUser www-data

Then add the following lines in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

<Directory /var/www/redmine>

RailsBaseURI /redmine

PassengerResolveSymlinksInDocumentRoot on

</Directory>

Then enable the passenger module for apache by running:

sudo a2enmod passenger

After that add the redmine softlink in the /var/www directory:

cd /var/www

sudo ln -s /usr/share/redmine/public redmine

Then you should be able to access it from http://localhost/redmine. Default username and password is admin:admin.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04

Finally decided to install the latest version of Ubuntu on my laptop. I tried the upgrade through Update Manager path. Left it to run and by the time I came back from work, I booted to blank screens. The Grub works but that's basically it. So I booted into Windows, downloaded the CD iso and burnt it and did a completely fresh install. This went much more smoother. Everything worked out of the box for my Acer 4810TG Timeline. Wireless, sound, everything that I usually use (Haven't even tried out the webcam since I've never used it).

But then yesterday something strange happen. There was no more volume and chat applet on the panel. So had to search for how I would reset it to the default and found it here. Basically the steps involve:

1) gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel

2) rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel

3) pkill gnome-panel

That's it and it all came back to normal default. Nice.

One thing I've got to mention is about the placement of the windows controller. At first I balked at the fact that it was on the left side of the windows rather than the right side like usual. And at work I actually switched it to be on the right side like normal using the following command:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string menu:minimize,maximize,close

But after a while I realized that I don't like it being normal again much. I got kinda used to it being on the left and wouldn't actually mind it, maybe even like it because it does create a sort of a unique experience, could be called a sort of an ubuntuish experience.. :P But anyhow, I didn't bother to learn how to reset it back on the left side at work. But now having formatted my home laptop, I've decided to keep it on the left. Feels more original.. :)

Ubuntu ROCKS!!!

ROCK!! Ubuntu really rocks!!

I've spent quite sometime even getting the wifi of this acer timeline 4810tg to work in archlinux, but in ubuntu 9.10, even the live CD was able to detect and use it. But that's not the best part. The best part is that I've finally got my Samsung SCX-4300 to work in Linux.. Wooohooo!!!

Followed the steps shown here. Installed the samsungmfp stuff from repo and walah.. scanner up and running. Oh.. and don't worry about the printer. It was detected and able to be used almost without any effort.

Sweet.. :) now I guess I'll need to buy a new toner for it, it'll be under heavy use from now on.. :D

Installing OpenOffice 3.1.0

Finally there is a need for me to actually install the latest version of OpenOffice.org. To do it first install the ppa by adding the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

And then you need to get the key for that ppa by running the command:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xd2bb86e0ebd0f0a43d4db3a760d11217247d1cff

After that a quick update to update the list of packages:

sudo apt-get update

And then I actually had to remove my old OpenOffice manually because it refused to upgrade it when I ran:

sudo apt-get upgrade

So to remove the old OpenOffice I did:

sudo apt-get remove --purge openoffice.org

And only after that I installed it again:

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org

Now it's ready to be tried out. Hope it all works.

p/s: Yeah. I'm still on Hardy. You should change that for you ppa if you are using intrepid or jaunty.

Joke's on you

I'm a Fedora ambassador, I recommend people to use Ubuntu, but I myself use Arch Linux. I'm not sure what that makes me.. :P But I love using Arch. It is lean, mean and geared towards the more tinkering inclined in the sense that almost everything is default and you have to hand configure yourself... with a text editor :D

So it was really sad for me last week to read that they are going to drop support for the i686. For a whole week I was contemplating which distro would I go to now? I really like Arch's way of a rolling update. Not waiting for a certain dateline but get the newest thing as soon as it's ready. But after reading that news I am concerned because I don't think my laptop support x86_64 (Haven't tried it yet though, but it's a really old laptop). And not only that, if one day I am fortunate enough to get myself a netbook of my own, I doubt those small atomic chips support 64bit either. So where should I go? My choice was 2. Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't tried the latest (Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10) but heard they have quite a lot of great new stuff. Fedora 10 even boots faster too. I'm still contemplating...

Then today I read this news. I was dumb struck. It's all an april fools joke? Wow.. they even mentioned about it in the forums and everything. I really thought it was real. But I'm glad it's not... :D So now I can be rest assured I can still use my favourite distro for quite a long while to come. I'm such an idiot.. :P Kudos to all the Arch Linux dev for pulling off such a convincing trick. And next time I'll be more careful to wait for a few days to confirm news heard on the 1st of April.. :D

So finally I guess the joke's on me.. :)

Running dosemu in Ubuntu Intrepid

dosemu is a great little program to use to keep all those old legacy dos programs you might still use running even in this modern day and age. But in Ubuntu 8.10 (or Xubuntu 8.10 for that matter), running `dosemu` right after installation will give a

LOMRAM mmap: Invalid argument
Segmentation fault

error. Based on the steps written here, you need to edit (with sudo of course) the file '/etc/sysctl.d/90-low-memory-access.conf' (the file might not exist yet, so just create it if it doesn't exist) and add in the line:

vm.mmap_min_addr=0

and then run

sudo invoke-rc.d procps start

Then you are all set. Now you can even run those old dos games of your misty youth or even some old dbase accounting programs if that's what you're into.. ;)

Oh yeah.. and another thing, printing works almost out of the box. Configure your ubuntu box with a default printer and even 'shift-print screen' will work. How cool is that? :D

MyMeeting, Ubuntu Netbook and other stuff

There has been a lot of things happening for the past month or so until I've been so busy I didn't get the time to update my blog properly and even if I had the time I'd rather use it to sleep to get back my energy. Anyhow things are much calmer now and let me take this opportunity to say a few things.. :)

First off the bat, MyMeeting has won an AIPA (Anugerah Inovasi Perkhidmatan Awam) and it was awarded by The Pak Lah himself (some people call me Pak Lah too but this is the real Pak Lah, the one that's running this country. I don't wish to run this country.. :P) at the AKSA (Anugerah Kecemerlangan Sektor Awam) 2008 on 27th November 2008. Check out some of the pictures of the OSCC booth on that day here.

I guess I'm pretty proud that it won that award. Now I can write on my resume, one of the developers of an award winning system.. :) LOL.. somehow I like the sound of that.. :P Whichever way it is, it has drawn quite a lot of attention to MyMeeting. And finally we get feedback from users.. Yay.. \o/ And thus why I've been so busy. MyMeeting has been developed quite a lot since then and finally I think I can be truly proud of it. Most of the features that I've been saying it has but wasn't actually implemented is now implemented.. >.< You can check it out at the MyMeeting trac.

Apart from that, quite recently (as in around 3 weeks ago), I've bought for my parents Dell Mini Inspiron 9. So one for my father, one for my mother (using their money of course.. :P). The funny thing was that my mother's mini just kept on having problems. It wouldn't shut down properly so suddenly you find that it's battery has been completely drained. It sometimes wouldn't detect the mouse. But my father's one was a-okay. My mom asked me to fix it. What was my answer? "You know you wouldn't have this problem if it was running linux rather than windows xp :P"... So she agreed to let me install Linux on it.. \o/

So I went out to buy an external DVD drive (I know there's ways to install it using usb pendrive and all but I need an external DVD drive anyway.. :P) and promptly installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it. I've read that because the SSD have limited amount of write cycles you should limit the amount of writing to it as much as possible. So rather than formatting the hard disk with an ext3 that has journaling (and thus more writes for every file operation) I opted to use ext2. Some people would also suggest not to have a swap partition as there would be lots of writes there too. But I've read somewhere else that most of the time you don't use enough memory to require a swap if you've got 1GB of ram (which the Dell Mini has) and thus wouldn't use it even if it's there making it okay to create a swap partition. But I didn't create a swap partition because what's the point. If you want to create a swap partition for suspend and stuff you need to create it at least 2.5 times larger than your amount of RAM. The Dell Mini has only 8 GB of real estate. After installing Ubuntu you're left with only around 5GB (compared to only 3GB with bare windows). 2.5GB would take away half of the available space. So forget suspending this baby. Better just shut it down. Googled for Ubuntu netbook and followed the instructions written here. Made sure to add maximus and netbook-launcher to the list of programs run at start-up (System->Preferences->Session for those who doesn't know).

The verdict. After over two weeks of using it, my mom loves it.. :D Now she's not embarrased when she try to boot up the netbook in front of her friends it doesn't boot. Or when she tries to connect the mouse it doesn't work. It just works and it's interface is lovely. And then it happened... My wife asked me to install it on her EEEPC too.. :) Her EEEPC was still using the original custom Xandros which greatly limited the amount of software (and even drivers) available for her. So I went and installed it. And because it has a 20GB SSD, there's plenty of space to create the swap partition (which I did). So just like I suspected it now boots a lot slower than the original Xandros (but still much faster than any kind of windows xp installation.. :P) but at least now she's running the latest software and drivers. There's a whole lot more issue with the EEEPC actually and I've still haven't got the internal mic to work yet. But at least bluetooth doggle should work (actually I haven't tried it yet.. :P).

Fuh.. this has turned into a longer post than I thought. So I'll just end it here. If you're a PHP developer (especially if you're a CakePHP developer) please check out MyMeeting and who knows, maybe you can contribute something. If you're not a developer but you know how to install web apps (php, mysql stack) try installing mymeeting and see whether maybe your organization can use it. If not give us a feedback on why and maybe we can make it happen.. ;) If you're neither of that but you know someone who is, tell them about it.. :)

Alrighty then, till next time...

Using firebug in Ubuntu Hardy Heron

*Update* Yesterday kaeru pointed out that firebug from the ubuntu repo works with the default firefox 3 beta on Hardy. Just tried it and I'm glad to report it does work very nicely. No more need for this workaround.. Just look for it in synaptic or apt-get install firebug.

What can I say? Ubuntu is pretty bleeding edge. :P It comes with firefox 3 beta 5 which is pretty slick. But there are still a lot of add-ons which do not work with firefox 3 beta. Earlier on I've blogged about using the 1.1 beta of firebug with firefox 3 beta. It works pretty well on my home box which runs arch linux. But on my computer at the office running on Ubuntu, firebug doesn't even come out. So I had to find a way around.

Luckily Firdaus of OSCC showed me that you actually can install Firefox 2 on Ubuntu. It's still in the repo and you just have to select it with synaptic or apt-get 'Firefox-2'. But the default installation will share the same default profile of Firefox 3 and so will break firebug when you launch Firefox 3. So what can you do? KageSenshi showed me how creating profiles for firefox will solve the problem. Well, first you have to create a different profile just for Firefox 2 by running 'firefox-2 -profilemanager'. There you can create your profile. Make sure you never use this new profile with Firefox 3 so what we do is that we change the command of the icon to start firefox 3 to 'firefox -P "Default"' and the icon to start firefox 2 to 'firefox-2 -P "firefox2"' (Use the name of the profile you created before). I don't think you can run both versions at the same time but I don't have time to experiment right now. These settings work and I have to get back to work.

Setting up awstats in ubuntu

Finally my server at abdullahsolutions.com has awstats after delaying to install it for so long. The steps I follow were found at here http://www.petersblog.org/node/697 . Here they are:

• Install awstats package
• Edit a file called /etc/awstats/awstats.hostname.conf where hostname is the hostname. Put something like this in it:

  LogFile="/var/log/apache/access.log"
  LogFormat=1
  DNSLookup=1
  DirData="/var/cache/awstats/"
  DirCgi="/cgi-bin"
  DirIcons="/icon"
  SiteDomain="hostname"
  AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1
  AllowFullYearView=3
  

• Make a directory called /var/cache and chmod it 777 so it can be used from the web server
• Copy icons to web directory:

  cp -r /usr/share/awstats/icon /var/www/icon
  

• Run this to update databases:

  /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=hostname -update
  

• In your web browser, go to the url:

  http://hostname/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=hostname
  

• Study the stats in quiet awe
• Edit crontab to update stats automatically every night:

  crontab -e
  0 1 * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=hostname -update
  

But my website is still pretty empty though. Hope to add more stuff soon.

Freedom of free software

One of the things which made me love free (free as in freedom) software was the choice of options open to you. What? You don't like this feature of this software? Look for another. Sometimes you change just because you can. In the beginning I distro hopped quite a bit. I enjoyed learning how each distro did things. Each unique and beautiful. I loved learning how to tweak every aspect of the system. It took me two weeks to get just the right display driver for X, but it was a great learning experience. Loved every agonizing ugly screen day of it. And then it came...

I tried out Ubuntu. OMG!!! What??? It has set up everything to work properly out of the box? I don't have to do anything? Even the brown colour looks kinda nice. Oh man... This is so cool. And the days passed. I usually develop using php. On personal projects I like to use python. So I don't really need to do much of the technical stuff so Ubuntu gave me a good platform to just start working. I don't actually need to compile anything. The last time I had to compile anything for my laptop was when I was running Slackware. Oh.. that was sweet hacker heaven. You HAD to tweak everything. And since I didn't know much about using packages under slackware then, once I had ./configure, make, make install, the programs never ever leave. I just didn't know which file to delete. If it have make uninstall option I might use that but not all had that.

And one of the distros that I had used in my distro hopping days was Arch linux. It was one of the more memorable ones. Actually used it for almost a year. Loved the pacman -Syu to keep my system updated. But of course you still had to tweak quite a lot. But I remembered there was wiki and forum for everything you need.

One of the sad things about having things made easy is that you tend to like it being easy. And in Ubuntu almost everything was already configurable using some graphical tool. There wasn't even any need of iwlist wlan0 scan to see what wireless network was available. It was just displayed there. Soon I got a bit rusty with the good old CLI. And I said to myself, enough is enough. I'm going back. Hmmm... Arch was pretty good. So this morning I decided to install good old archlinux. But guess what? I was pretty scared. I WAS SCARED!!! I thought what if I had to take the whole day configuring it? What if some of the drivers I can't figure out again how to install it? I had FEAR!! I had UNCERTAINTY!! I had DOUBT!! Everything you need to launch a full scale FUD attack. Ubuntu made me forget that is how most people felt about Linux and free software in general. Ubuntu did a great job. If ever you wanted proof that Linux is ready for the desktop prime time, that was it. You could just install it without worrying about anything. And actually, personally I think installing Ubuntu is even easier than installing windows because there was no need to hunt for drivers. So I said this is ridiculous. I went ahead and installed arch...

Now I'm posting this from epiphany because I haven't finished installing all the software I need yet. Not even firefox. My display is stretched because I haven't install 915resolution yet and in general everything looks pretty retro 90's kinda style. Sweeeet... :)

Enable .htaccess rewrite in Ubuntu Server

Fuh.. Finally after so long abdullahsolutions.com is up again. It seems that actually it wasn't my hardware that was broken but just the filesystem of my old hard disk. Now I've put in a new hard disk and installed Ubuntu Server 7.10 on it. And just for the site itself I've decided to try out drupal.

Downloaded it and installed it. All seems to be going fine right now. No problems yet. Except for the pretty urls. I needed to enabled mod_rewrite and had no idea how to do that in Ubuntu Server. So after googling it a bit I found just the thing. Type:
a2enmod rewrite

That is short for apache2 enable module. That would create the necessary link in mods-enabled but I still couldn't use the pretty urls in drupal. Well, it turns out that the settings in sites-available/default would not allow override. So had to change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All. It's good now.