UDS-L

I’m slightly late, but have been very busy in the last few weeks: getting married, founding a LUG, organising a workshop, etc

So, here are the main points of what was decided at UDS-L in Dallas, TX on 16-20.11.2009, regarding what will change in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04:

1. The GIMP is out of the default seed, replaced by F-Spot (already included)
   The main reason is to free disk space on the LiveCD, but also because it was too complicated for beginners, and too slow and heavy. Removing GIMP on my machine freed up 76MB! And you can always install it afterwards, if you can’t do without it.
   Two alternatives were briefly considered: Shotwell (not even included in the default repos) and gThumb (moved from main to universe due to slow upstream development). EOG is kept as the default lightweight image viewer.
2. Usplash is replaced by Plymouth, already used by Fedora and part of the freedesktop.org project. I know Intel will insist that all this is futile and efforts would be better spent on minimizing the boot time to just a few seconds, so no xsplash/usplash/plymouth is necessary! Though I must admit several actions in that direction are planned!
3. PiTiVi is now included in the default seed
4. The “100 papercuts” project will be continued
5. Ubuntu One Music Store!!!
6. The LPIA (Intel Atom) architecture is dropped

I will update this over time as I discover more…

References:

• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid

tomboy notes location

Tomboy notes are saved under ~/.local/share/tomboy

version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference

After installing a very old (R13, from 2002) version of Matlab for Linux, I tried starting the license manager and was getting this error message:

./lmgrd: relocation error: ./lmgrd: symbol errno, version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference

However, strings /lib/libc.so.6 | grep GLIB said otherwise!!!

In the end, I discovered that this just meant the lmgrd executable was compiled against an old version of libc, and could not be made to work with newer versions of Linux.

Now I got Matlab 2008b for Linux and it works fine…

Dell PowerEdge SC1430

This is most likely the most powerful machine I’ve ever set my hands on:

• 2xQuadCore Xeon E5320 @ 1.86GHz (module: p4-clockmod)
• 4GB RAM on an Intel 5000V memory controller [8086:25d4] (module: i5000_edac)
• graphics: ATI ES1000 [1002:515e]
  (can’t handle resolutions higher than 1152×864, the message in /var/log/Xorg.0.log is “mode requires too much memory bandwidth”)
• sas-raid: Dell PERC5 [1028:0015] (module: megaraid_sas) http://linux.dell.com/storage.shtml
• ethernet: Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5751 [14e4:1677] (module: tg3)
• no soundcard!!!

I was also seeing a message in dmesg:  “out of memory: process ureadahead killed”. Not sure why the oom-killer got activated, but removing ureadahead made it go away…

.cr2 files

.cr2 files are Canon RAW images. To convert them to something EyeOfGnome can open, use the dcraw command… (converts to .ppm by default)

Afterwards, to convert the .ppm files to .jpg, use the mogrify command (part of imagemagick):
mogrify -format jpg *.ppm

top music players

The top music players under Linux are (in no particular order):

• Rhythmbox (part of Gnome)
• Banshee (based on Mono, supports also MacOS)
• Amarok (part of KDE, unofficially supports also MacOS and Windows)

All three (plus Songbird) are based on the GStreamer framework!!!

external ip from the command line

To find your external IP address from the command line, run:

curl www.whatismyip.org

Reference: http://linuxgravity.com/finding-external-ip-from-command-line

hostname, slow sudo on Fedora

1. A normal user does not have sudo priviledges by default in Fedora, you need to add them to the /etc/sudoers file, and then log out and back in
2. After that, sudo commands work, but are very slow. This happens when it cannot resolve its own hostname in /etc/hosts
3. The hostname is set in /etc/sysconfig/network

MacMini3,1

We got a couple of new MacMini’s at work; these are the new 3,1 models, running Snow Leopard.

Specs:

• Intel Core2 Duo P7350 @2.00GHz, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD
• nVidia MCP79 North/Southbridge
• graphics: nVidia C79 GeForce 9400 [10de:0861] (module: nvidia)
• audio: nVidia MCP79 HDA [10de:0ac0] (module: snd_hda_intel)
• ethernet: nVidia MCP79 [10de:0ab0] (module: forcedeth)
• wifi: Broadcom BCM4328 [14e4:4328] (module: wl)

References:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mac_mini3-1/Karmic
• http://blog.costan.us/2009/03/ubuntu-810-or-904-on-mac-mini.html
• https://edge.launchpad.net/~mactel-support/+archive/ppa

suspend on lid closing

Recently my eee701 started going into suspend (S3) when closing the lid while still at the gdm login screen.

This was due to the power management settings of the (system) “gdm” account. The solution was to set a password for gdm (by sudo passwd gdm), then logging in as gdm and changing the relevant power setting…