Compact Gwibber Theme

I've been using Gwibber for my twitter account. I like Gwibber but it doesn't display as many posts in the window as Twhirl which I was using back when I used Windows. I don't want to install Adobe Air just for use with my twitter acount (although I may do so for the iPlayer). The answer was to hack myself a new theme that was more compact. I had found a theme from listento.jaketolbert.com called gw-mod which claimed to be more compact. It was more compact but not by much more, but the fact that it existed prompted me to have a go at my own.

I based my theme on gw-mod, but made the following changes:
- reduced the font sizes
- reduced the radius on the corners
- reduced the margins and padding on all the items
- set a black background
- removed the 1 pixel black shadow on the text (not needed with the darker background)

If you use Gwibber for things other than Twitter I may have broken some of the style sheet settings as I made changes throughout the CSS in the theme's HTML file, but have only tested against Twitter.

If you like the theme and wat to try it. I have linked here to an archive of my theme which I named scb-compact.

Each has a its own folder containing the theme components. The folder names appear as the theme name in the Gwibber->Preferences dialogue. To install the theme just unpack the archive file into the Gwibber theme's directory. On my Ubuntu machine the themes directory is at '/usr/local/share/gwibber/ui/themes'.

The themes directory is not writable with your standard user account so you will need to use sudo to raise your privileges to do so. These are the steps to install:

1. Download the scb-compact.tar.gz file to your home directory
2. Open the terminal from Applications->Accessories
3. Run the following commands entering your login password when prompted:
> cd /usr/local/share/gibber/ui/themes
> sudo tar -xvf ~/scb-compact.tar.gz
4. Exit the terminal using [Ctrl] D or typing exit
5. In Gwibber->Preferences select the theme scb-compact

Linux Podcasts

Podcasts are a fantastic way to learn a little bit more about any subject, whilst driving, shopping or doing other chores. There's a whole heap of them available too, you can find a comprehensive list at The Linux Link. Having listened to a few there are two that I'd highly recommend; Linux Outlaws and the Ubuntu UK Podcast.



Covering just Ubuntu, the Ubuntu UK Podcast is suitable for any age. It's hosted by a group of co-hosts and the content is generally well informed.



The Linux Outlaws podcast is very entertaining, covers a whole heap of open source software topics, but is not always suitable for children. The hosts Dan and Fab communicate their enthusiasm for Linux in a distinctive and amusing way, keeping the audience up to date on the latest software releases and Open Source news. They have an excellent theme tune which I think Dan wrote and played. If something is not really up to scratch there's no beating around the bush Fab's going to call it Crap! Their regular Microwatch feature is always fun too.

SuSE on a VMware image

I finally have a real reason to use a Linux machine for work, it was going to happen sooner or later, Linux is becoming recognised as a viable alternative, more readily.

For the current project its useful to have an example of the Documentum system in order to demonstrate and exercise use case examples. The latest version of Documentum 6.5 when installed on a Windows Server with SQL Server 2005 gets really resource hungry, which can be really challenging when trying to run it in a virtual machine on a moderately well specified laptop. Fortunately the Documentum product set is now certified for install on Linux.

So for the current project I'm working on, we are using a SuSE VM to run a database (Oracle), Documentum Content Server and an Apache Tomcat application server. Playing around with Ubuntu in my home machine has proved to be a good enough intro for me to get to grips with this SuSE image.

Like Ubuntu, SuSe is available with the Gnome or KDE desktop, because its lighter we are using Gnome. The main differences I'm noticing is that the SuSE distribution uses a different method of managing the application packages, different configuration tools, and a different menu system for starting desktop applications.

The SuSE Gnome desktop is configured differently from Ubuntu, has a different menu system, showing just a few apps initially then showing the rest in a separate window after you click on the more applications button. The only real change necessary was to move the toolbar to the top of the window, as that’s more convenient when viewing a virtual machine in a small console window with scroll bars. Because its working offline there is a window that continually pops up with an error, something to do with software update checking, I guess. Occasionally that little window hangs and cannot be closed so I added the little toolbar applet that lets you kill applications, so I can easily get rid of it when it happens (this would be handy in XP too). I also added an exit button applet as on SuSE this is hidden in the menu system like on XP.

Red Hat and SuSE (Novell) both use Yast (yet another setup tool), this pulls all the admin tools into one framework. Yast has proved to be quite useful in setting the OS up to fit our requirements. Yast was also useful to stop and start services as our image did not always (read often) manage to start the Documentum content server service.

So do I like SuSE? Well it works OK and seems fairly robust, no unexpected crashes despite a lot of fiddling about with system settings. As I’m not downloading standard packaged applications on SuSE, I can’t really comment on the relative merits of the RPM (Redhat package manager) versus the Debian apt package tools. I prefer the configuration choices for Gnome that Ubuntu uses to those of the SuSE distribution though.

Hardy Heron Upgrade causes no real problems

I've not really had a lot to blog about here lately, since everything has pretty much run well without trouble.

The Hardy Heron upgrades on all 3 platform, Old Celeron, Whizzy Core 2 duo machine and the VMware image. The one thing worthy of note is the fact that I was asked if I wished to retain some device configuration file change that I had made during the original install to get the wireless networking to run. On the Whizzy machine it all just worked.

On the old Celeron an additional software download was required as I had needed to use fwcutter to get the Belkin Broadcom BC43 based wireless card to work. Once wired back up to the router with a cable I was able to re-enable the Device driver in the Hardware Drivers utility, which caused it to download and update the neccesary packages and automatically download the correct windows driver files and manipulate them to work with Linux. After which I jut had to disconnect the cable to the router and select the wireless network in the connection applet.



Setting up the wireless on the previous version of Ubuntu had taken me a whole evening using support information from the Ubuntu forum. The Hardy Heron update just worked. I wonder if Hardy would have just worked with this hardware configuration if it had been a fresh install? I suspect it might have Ubuntu seems to be getting better all the time.

It just works

My son's PC is very rarely booted into Windows now. He seems to prefer using Ubuntu Linux to Windows, I wasn't expecting that. He commented that it was quite like his friends Apple machine, which I though was a very insightful comment on his part, since Apple's OSX is based on BSD UNIX so could be expected to be more similar to Linux than Windows.

I was expecting a lot of 'Dad how do I make it do...?' type questions, but there's been none of that at all, on the whole it just works. I asked him how he was managing with connecting his iPod and he said that was fine, he just plugged it in and something like iTunes just popped up. He showed me, he plugged it in and sure enough Rythmbox popped up with his iPod contents there ready for use. When I asked what he used windows for when he did boot into it, he said mainly to get to files that were in the windows system (although on install it copied everything over from his windows ID, it seems that items on the desktop do not get pulled across). So I showed him how to mount and unmount the windows drive in the file manager application, now he only rarely needs to access Windows.

My 8 year old daughter is finding her way around the old Celeron box OK too. I added the music player to the launch bar for her so that she could get to the music easily. Later that day I found that she'd added her favourite game to the launchbar too. She's quite capable of using the machine and is enjoying the the Tux Type typing tutor as well as the games and the Internet. So it seems that Linux is easy enough for an 8 year old to get to grips with.

Once its up and running on your hardware, Ubuntu is a very workable alternative to Windows. So in the case of my sons PC this has been totally painless. However if the hardware is not readily recognised by the default installation, as in the case of the wireless and graphics card on the old Celeron machine, it can be challenging for a non expert. That said its currently possible to by a new 'Linux ready' machine for only £130 from eBuyer (at time of writing), that would be perfectly suitable for office use.

Editing text files in Linux

At some point you may end up having to edit a text file from a command line prompt, perhaps to change a configuration file on advice from a forum post.

There's a joke in the professional UNIX community "users haven't got CLUE", they even walk around in t-shirts with puns on to that effect. CLUE stands for 'command line user experience'. Unlike MS-DOS and the related windows 'command' window, the command shell in a UNIX or LINUX distribution has a very powerful tool set, enabling complex tasks to be undertaken very swiftly with a short series of commands. Using these tools effectively requires knowledge and experience, remembering the subtleties and nuances of these commands is a memory feat in itself. When it comes to editing files the traditional command line editors available at the command line are extremely capable and powerful in the hands of an experienced user, or programmer, but for you or I they are next to useless for the occasional edit to a file. So an old hand at Linux or Unix is likely suggest that you edit a file with 'vi', 'ed', 'Emacs' or 'vim', as does some of the assistance available to you on-line. Instead, in Ubuntu, use 'nano' which is a nice simple text editor that will work pretty much as you would expect, even if, like me, you don't have CLUE.

Souping up an old Celeron

As my candidate for Linux I've used an old PC circa 2001. It had only 128MB of memory, and an 800MHz Celeron processor on an Intel i810 motherboard with internal graphics. It ran XP Home like an absolute dog, even with no anti-virus installed. On top of this the mouse port was working intermittently. I initially assumed that it would not be a suitable candidate for one of the major distributions, so I started playing with some smaller distributions suitable for older machines, before realising that it would run Ubuntu.

Sure enough Ubuntu ran fine on the machine, and recognised the USB mouse. For office use with Open Office it would be fine. But for an 8 year old girl it really didn't meet the mark. It wouldn't run any of the fun Linux games with 3D graphics (2 frames a second is unplayable) and couldn't do all the 3D eye candy tricks that her brother's 1 year old dual core machine would. So without spending a fortune how far could I push this machine? So after sorting out some wireless networking it was time to hit eBay for some second hand kit.

• Pink light up in the dark, optical USB mouse (new) £4.94
• 256mb PC133 Memory £8.97
• Asylum FX5200 256 MB PCI nVidia graphics card £28.01

The mouse was just ideal for an 8 year old girl. The memory took the machine from marginal to adequate (Linux just isn't as memory hungry as XP or Vista). The graphics card is perhaps more than strictly necessary.

The internal graphics capability of the Intel 810 chipset on the motherboard was awful and probably the main flaw with the machine. My old 300MHz P3 machine in 1999, which had a modest 3d card was faster, so I knew that a proper graphics card could deliver some real performance improvement. There was no AGP graphic slot in the machine, and its way too old to take a later PCI-Express graphics card, this meant a PCI card would have to do. So I set to reading the forums, to judge what older 3d graphics cards were likely to work with Linux. This is a generalisation but seems that an ATI card works if you are lucky, but can cause a lot of grief and may not work at all. Most of the forum posts regarding Linux and nVidia cards seem to end in the cards working and there's plenty of advice as to how to achieve that. So it was to be an nVidia card.

Upgrades went fine up to the point of installing the graphics card, but given the amount of advice around the topic this was not a big surprise. After installing the card the machine booted Ubuntu showing the nice logo and progress bar during startup at the expected resolution. However the desktop failed to appear. This meant that the BIOS on the motherboard had detected the card and the card was working fine, but the X11/Xwindows server was failing to pick it up.

If this happens you can boot Linux in recovery mode by pressing [esc] at the boot menu, then use the command console to modify the settings and sort things out. Recovery mode starts up Linux in the command console. The first thing was to re run the configuration for Xwindows to select a sensible driver for the card, and set an 800x600 screen resolution.

: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

This re-ran the setup routine and enabled me to select the 'nv' driver (Linux community Nvidia driver) and set the lower resolution. After restarting the machine it still was not working. Advice suggested that the Xserver software was not being configured to talk to the new card and was most likely trying to talk to the now disabled motherboard graphics device. The answer was to determine the new card's identity and its PCI bus reference, then update the configuration files to reflect that. The configuration for X11 was in the file '/etc/X11/xorg.conf', which indeed was still pointing to the internal graphics card. To find the information about the card, I ran the 'lspci' (list the devices on the PCI bus) command to get the bus address and device name, then replaced the references to the on-board graphics in the xorg.conf file with this information.

After these changes, the GUI was restored. Using the admin tools in the GUI I managed to select a suitable Nvidia legacy driver to get back to 1280x1024 resolution.

The machine was now upgraded, but to get the full benefit from the card, it would require the manufacturer's driver which is one of the 'restricted' drivers. You can make this happen automatically by selecting the 'advanced desktop effects' in the 'Appearance Preferences' dialogue. After selecting this it asks if you wish to use the restricted driver, on saying yes to this, you have to reboot, then the nVidia driver is installed and you can get the full potential out of the graphics card.

After this I installed the Compiz Fusion 3d desktop effects, more of which in a later post. Its amazing, the crappy 7 year old PC will now play 3d games (penguins sliding down hills etc.) and has desktop eye candy that makes Vista look tame. Well worth £28 of anyone's money.

In conclusion, yes with Linux you can add a few more years useful life to an old PC. However adding high end graphics to an old Intel 810 based PC running Linux is not for the faint hearted or the novice to computing, but once again the community support offered on the Ubuntu forums had all the answers required to make this happen. Perhaps later releases of Ubuntu will sort this out too, they do seem to be getting this distribution more robust and usable every release.

Setting up wireless networking (even when it doesn't work first time)

The network cards arrived, but I'd stupidly ordered PCMCIA cards rather than PCI cards. Thats what happens when you order things on-line late at night when you really ought to be going to bed.

So do avoid further disappointment, I took a trip to the local computer store only to find that they only card they had was another Belkin card. So I left it and went to the local electrical goods emporium who "do sell wireless cards, but they're out of stock". Uh, what's happening has there been a run on Wireless in our town?

After an hour or so I calmed down and applied logic to the problem. There must be hundreds of thousands of these cards out there, and there's definitely a big community of Linux hackers out there, someone must have a driver that'll work.

This is what my research turned up: The built in wireless network device programs (drivers) in Ubuntu support a wide range of cards, so that cards based on many of the currently common chip sets will work straight off. If your card is not recognised by default its likely that you will need to get an alternate driver. The first thing I had to do was to determine the chip-set on the card.

To find the chipset I pulled the card from the machine and noted the model number on the board so as to look it up on the Internet. Don't do this, as I found out later,you don't need to. Linux has a handy little tool that will tell you which card you have. Opening a console (terminal) window and typing the lspci command (list pci) will show a list of all the hardware connected to the PCI bus, which will include both motherboard devices and any cards installed. From this line in the list, I could confirm the card's chipset:

03:06.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)

Having found the card I was able to check it against the WirelessCardsSupported list here. I was right, it's not supported by the default install. So the hunt was on for a driver. There are no Linux drivers for that chip set, that I can find. But as it turns out that's still not the end of the line. The guys who write software for Linux are clever, they've written a piece of software that wraps around a windows wireless driver that makes it work with the Linux Kernel. Its called Ndiswrapper, it can be used if the Linux Kernel has been compiled with the correct support; which in the case of Ubuntu, it has. Following the Community Ubuntu Documentation Ndiswrapper instructions had the card working within 10 minutes. This page refers to a list of tested windows drivers for the various chip sets, which you can download. You then follow instructions for disabling the current wireless driver, and installing Ndiswrapper with your Windows driver.

Its this kind of detailed support that's making Ubuntu a workable alternative to Windows.

Arrgh, where's the wireless +<( Ah here it is (^__^)

When we bought a machine for my son I had the XP-Media Center installed rather than Vista Home. Having read a little about how Vista is designed and some of the implications of this, it was a bit of a no brainer, since it cost no more to have a less crippled operating system with more capability. However there may be a time when the Windows XP is no longer in support and this machine will still be viable hardware. Hence making it Dual Boot seemed like a good idea, both my son and I can get used to a Linux OS before making any commitment to jump.

As I said the install went smoothly. Whilst installing Ubuntu I was politely informed that there was no network connection so software updates would have to be carried out later. This was no real surprise though, since although it was a new machine it was an old Belkin wireless card, which was pretty marginal in Windows.

After browsing the Internet for a bit, it seems the advice is to go for a standard card from a big name vendor such as Linksys, D-Link or such. I had a hunt for a card on-line, and strangely enough the prices of wireless network cards in eBay are only slightly lower than buying new from a reputable on-line dealer.

Well if I was going to buy new, I decided to make sure the card I was buying was supported by the major Linux distributions. After a short search I came upon thelinuxemporium who sell both software and hardware, along with Linux supported PCI, PCMCIA and USB wireless adaptors. I went for the Comtrend RT2500 54 Mbps Wireless PCMCIA card, which it says "works 'out-of-the-box' in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty and 7.10 Gutsy" and only costs £10. If I bought the more expensive Edimax card which they offer at £19.45, and is tested against more versions of Linux, I would be entitled to free support too. At that price I bought one for the little old Celeron box too.

I'm still waiting with anticipation for the wireless cards, but its only been two days.

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p. s. It seems that I didn't press the final button on the transaction, all fixed now I'm told the wireless cards should arive on Friday.

Fixing the sound in Ubuntu on VMware

Installing Ubuntu on VMware went OK, the only thing was, there was no sound. When clicking on the sound icon to turn on the sound the OS reported that there was no sound hardware.

Investigating the issue, I found that the virtual machine configuration that VMware server supplied for Ubuntu had no reference to sound devices. This was quickly fixed by adding the following two lines into the .vmx file holding the machine definition.

sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"

These lines were added just after the definition for the Ethernet device. On rebooting the virtual machine the sound was enabled.

My guess is that VMware defaults are designed for serious server use rather than playing with desktops, hence the lack of a default sound card in the configuration.

Where to run Linux?

Ok I've decided to have a go with Linux, but where should I install it and what options are there, bearing in mind that I don't really want to burn all my bridges with windows (yet)?

There are a number of options:

• Run Linux from a Live CD (leaves your Windows machine untouched)
  
• Install on a second separate machine (make mine a Linux)
  
• Make my machine a dual boot machine
• Run inside Windows

I'm having a punt at all of these so I'll note a bit more on each option

Live CD
This straight forward enough as long as the machine's BIOS is set to boot from a CD-ROM before its hard drive. If it doesn't work straight off, most live CDs appear to offer you some command line options to try to get it to work. Based on a couple of runs at this I've found that the main draw back with the live CD is if your hardware is not a good match with the default configuration on the CD, you cant get full use of the system. For instance I could not get the full screen resolution running a live CD. Also may of the live CDs do not have the codecs for MP3 (since the mp3 codecs are not truly open source), so you cant listen to music. Some time in the future I might have a go at the run from memory stick thing to see if that will overcome this limitation.

Install on a separate machine
This may be the simplest safest option initially, until you get comfortable with Linux. Not only do you not risk your Windows machine, you also have the option of using your windows machine to browse the internet for support if you break Linux.

Dual Boot machine
If you have enough space on your hard drive or can add in a second one, this may be the best option. Ubuntu installer holds your hand very well when making a machine into a dual boot machine. More about this in a later post.

Running Inside Windows
There are a number of ways to approach this. The two key options here are running inside a virtual machine or running a distribution designed to run inside a running windows installation. From what I've been able to make out the distributions designed to run within windows are modified versions of Linux where the Linux kernel is run within a windows service and the storage is all held in a big file in the windows storage. I've decided to use VMware to run a linux virtual machine to play with this idea. I'm going to avoid the 'modified for windows' distributions as they are not standard (if there is such a thing with Linux) and I want to learn about the OS in as real a situation as I can. I've chosen VMware as I'm familiar with VMware from Running Windows Server in it, VMware also appears to be the best option if the host OS is Windows, and last but not least its free.

What is a Linux live CD, how do I run a Linux live CD

Many of the Linux distributions have a Live-CD available. This is a whole operating system packed onto a CD (or DVD), which can be used directly from the CD without installing anything on your PC. Live-CDs are used for a number of reasons:

• Trying out Linux before committing to use it
• Running a Linux install in a user friendly way
• Using Linux tools to fix a machine or rescue data
• Using a machine without changing any data on it
  

If you are lucky all you need to do to run a live-cd is put it in the drive and restart the machine, however that may not be the case for all machines.

To use a Live-CD the PC must be able to boot the operating system from a cd-rom rather than the hard drive. When a PC is switched on a small piece of software in the mother-board (the BIOS) decides where to load the operating system from (typically the hard drive). On most PCs its possible for the Operating system to be loaded from any storage device, such as the floppy disk, the hard drive, CD-ROM , DVD-ROM or even a memory stick. If the machine looks for the operating system on the internal hard drive before looking at the CD-ROM, then the Linux live-cd does not get a chance to load. To fix this you will need to change the boot sequence in the BIOS settings. The BIOS settings can usually be accessed by pressing F2 when the machine is starting up (it may be another key, in which case look at the manual for the machine).

With some Linux distributions its even possible to boot the operating system from a memory stick. This means that you can have your own operating system and documents on a usb stick and take your computer around with you. If I try this I'll blog about it here.

However its worth noting that not everything always works, this was my Experience: Laptops have not been a great success. My Acer laptop can't boot from a CD since I've lost the BIOS admin password (set in an attempt to teenager proof the machine) and can't change the settings (my fault and very stupid on my part). The Fujitsu Amilo 2010 laptop will not run the Linux Windowing environment because the Graphics chip is not compatible with the standard Ubuntu Live-CD. The 128MB old machine has not enough memory to allow the Ubuntu Linux Windowing environment to start. However my son's PC worked fine first time and the old 128MB PC booted into DamnSmallLinux Live-CD without problems.

Choosing your Linux for a home PC (Ubuntu)

Linux comes in many types (distributions), so you need to choose which one to use. For Linux this is both a strength and a weakness; a strength because there is a Linux operating system configured to suit most purposes but a weakness because it is one more hoop to jump through for a new user.

This is my initial recommendation, for a home user the choice can be simplified, if you have a good enough machine to run Ubuntu then use Ubuntu. Providing you have a fairly standard machine Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows, and installs faster. If you have an older machine (less than 256MB ram and slow processor) that just can't cope with running Ubuntu then you need to look for a small lightweight distribution which I'll cover in a later post.

As with pretty much any Linux distribution Ubuntu is free!

It comes on CD, which you can either download for free, buy online or request for free (if you can wait 6-10 weeks). Downloading is for most the best option, you download an '.iso' file, which if you have cd burner software on your PC will get burned to a real cd when you double-click on it.

Ubuntu is supplied as a 'Live-CD'. Once you have your CD you can try out Ubuntu Linux before committing to install it on your PC. This is good because if it runs from OK the CD its pretty certain to be OK when you install it.

Venture Into Linux - Why am I doing this?

There's a whole bunch of reasons that have pushed me to looking into Linux in a little more depth. Whilst doing this I will Blog my experience for the following reasons:

• Writing it down will consolidate my knowledge
• Enable others to use my experience to ease their Introduction to Linux
• Give something back to the Linux community, albeit in a small way (its the least I can do they're giving me all this free software)
  

As an IT professional for the last 13 years of so, I've watched Linux come more to the fore, it seems to me that its reaching a critical mass where there is a need for me to understand it in more depth to remain credible. It's no longer just a hobby horse for the command line UNIX jocks (no offense intended, but I guess they're not likely to be reading this), Linux distributions are now being mentioned along side Windows and Unix in the supported platforms for serious software.

At home, I seem to be doing increasing IT service work supplying and maintaining computers for the kids. And teenage daughters are demanding clients. Through using excellent open source and free software, I've managed to rain in the permanently infected Windows PC to a manageable solution to date. I've even managed to persuade them to use OpenOffice for their homework, despite the schools having an almost Microsoft only stance.

So I'm kicking off several projects to get my head around Linux, the idea being a gentle introduction through using Desktops on the home PCs then progressing to playing with server stuff and some more serious applications. With this in mind I've a number of projects to kick off this learning curve.

1. Old PC with limited resources (Celeron 800Mhz and 128mb of RAM). Now the youngest is of an age where she'll need a computer and the machine I have to hand is a bit old, runs XP like a dog, so lets try a Linux desktop.
2. Dual core AMD machine 2GB of memory and some bells & whistles. This is my son's machine, he's seen pictures of high end Linux on YouTube and wants his XP machine to do that too. So we're making it dual boot.
3. Linux Live CD tools. Live CDs will boot up and run Linux without messing up your current install. This should let me play with a bunch of different Distributions of Linux.
4. Linux running in VMware on XP. I use VMware, which can allow an operating system to run inside another by creating virtual PCs. This will give me a playground to try out stuff without investing in any more hardware.

So that's the start point. This Blog is a little late starting as I've been looking into this for a couple of weekends now, so there'll be a bunch of initial catch up posts to follow this up.