ubuntu

I just did a normal upgrade of suggested security patches that included a kernel update. I typically run dual monitors using "Twinview" that allows me to drag windows from one monitor to another.

After the upgrade, the drivers refuse to recognize the second monitor. I've swapped cables and both monitors work, but even after swapping it defaults back to the right hand screen. The NVidia control panel swears that I only have one screen attached.

I've tried restoring my xorg.conf file from backup, blowing it away entirely and recreating it with the NVidia tool and manually editing it by hand all to no avail. Something seems to have broken twinview in the new updates.

Very frustrating...

Update...

Turns out the monitor cable was at fault - the cable fine after swapping to the other port, but it wouldn't detect that the monitor was there when things were started up. Weird that it didn't occur until a reboot.

Our receptionist PC motherboard was dying, so I threw together a new $400 PC from a barebones MSI box, an enterprise-grade HD, a Celeron 64 bit CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Simple and easy.

Restoring the PC to operational status was very easy because of the PXE boot setup, our Puppet installation, and the use of Duplicity for backups.

I simply booted the new hardware (note the lack of DVD, CD or floppy drive) from the network, picked to install Ubuntu 64 bit and gave it the same hostname as her old PC. Then I walked away. Literally only 10 minutes from unpacking until the PC was installing it's OS unattended.

I came back about 20 minutes later to a newly installed OS with all updates and patches already applied. Then I just ran a single duplicity command line to restore the home directory from the backups and voila!

Yeah, Linux network administration is awesome.

Today I was fed a series of updates for Karmic. At first things went wacko, but only because I'd installed a test version of the NVidia drivers on my system while trying to fix the problems myself. After I reinstalled the standard driver and logged back in things seem much better. My Compiz crashes appear gone.

More importantly, the flash click interactive bug is fixed - when Karmic first hit the streets, on 64 bit with Flash and advanced desktop effects you couldn't interact with most flash animations and videos with the mouse (without having to pull some tricks.) Thankfully that issue is gone.

Also, it appears they've fixed the flash performance issues - hulu.com works great in full screen now without having to increase my CPU speed to max manually.

Very nicely done, Canonical. Very nicely done indeed.

Here's a side-by-side example of Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows 7 on identical hardware. You decide.

For security reasons, many businesses are completely disabling USB storage devices on the computers at work. Particularly if you are like me and work with healthcare information, it's doubly important that not only no one can bring in a virus, but that they also can't leave with any private information.

In Linux the risk of viruses are small to nonexistent, however USB sticks automatically mount for reading and writing regardless. There's an easy way in recent Ubuntu distributions to disable USB storage devices. Simply blacklist the kernel driver:

sudo echo "blacklist usb-storage" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

After that, nobody can use a USB memory stick in that computer, but still allows the administrator(s) to manually load the module and use it.

I'll be giving more enterprise Linux tips in the near future if all goes well.

Some time ago I installed the official version 9.1 of Acrobat reader on my 64-bit Ubuntu desktop. If I remember correctly I had downloaded the distro-independent installer from Acrobat's website.

A few months ago an update to Firefox caused it to crash if Firefox were open at the same time. It took me a while to realize that was what caused it. At first I just realized that if I ever tried to open a PDF file from a web page it crashed, but other times it worked fine. Finally I realized the other times were any time that Firefox wasn't open.

A bit of Googling led me to a few threads about a known issue with Adobe 9 that caused this. Well, kudos to the Adobe guys because they listened, found and fixed the problem. Adobe 9.1.2 fixes the problem.

Since I'm running a 64 bit OS and Adobe only releases 32 bit Linux versions, I had to force the install of the Debian package by doing:

sudo dpkg -i --force-all AdbeRdr*

Now, no more crashes with PDF's. Yes, I know I could use eVince in Linux to natively display PDF files, but I've found a few display bugs with more complex PDF's and when Adobe is kind enough to produce a Linux version, I might as well use it.

As a web developer, you need to be able to test multiple browsers. As a Linux web developer, it can be hard to do that without having a Windows machine around.

With the latest edition of Wine (Windows emulator for Linux) it's not that hard to do. There are a couple of downsides, like transparent images sometimes don't render properly, and there's a bit of a problem with the background around the control buttons, but it works and it renders pages using IE7, which is the entire point, anyway. The biggest downside is the lack of HTTPS or SSL support.

I'm going to make the assumption you are using Ubuntu Jaunty, so you might need to adapt a few things if you aren't.

First, I'd recommend using the latest edition of Wine, instead of the one packaged with your system. This is especially important if you plan on running any recent games in Wine. You can compile your own copy from the sources, or just use the provided repositories from winehq. The package provided with Ubuntu is very old in Internet days, so I don't recommend using it.

My brother was wanting to do some video editing work on files from his HD camcorder. He knew I did some video work in Linux and called to see what I used.

Unfortunately like so many people his brand new computer was an over-the-counter machine with some unsupported hardware, rather than a custom build that would work out of the box. The first problem was his lack of nVidia drivers for the new GTX 220. A Google found that nVidia actually has a beta driver in their FTP site that would work, despite it not being returned by their web interface in searches.

The next problem was his sound not working - A simple fix in the modules.d to set a probe parameter (it was detecting as the wrong card) and it suddenly worked.

Then, this morning he called to brag about playing Tuxracer on his dual screens and how the penguin rode in the middle, bridging both screens.

It went from "reboot to do video editing" to actually having used Linux for a decent number of hours for other things already.

Ever since upgrading to Jaunty I've been hating the fact that I made the switch. Early on I had overall video performance problems but shortly after the initial release of Jaunty an update fixed those.

Yet still I had horrible full-screen video performance from Macromedia Flash - especially on sites like Hulu.

Well today I found the solution. It seems that the power-saving "ondemand" features in Jaunty was never coming out of power save mode to handle the increased CPU usage of full screen Flash video. Simply adding the "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" to the taskbar and setting the CPU to "Performance" - or manually setting it at a higher speed - solved the issue.

As you may have guessed from yesterday's post, I've just finished a complete reinstall of our PBX system. The old system was running on Mandrake (yeah, Mandrake NOT Mandriva) and had done a great job. Unfortunately we were having a phone port lock up periodically that would require rebooting the server.

Since another "event" left me with a spare motherboard and rack mounted case I went ahead and ordered a Digium PCI-Express analog card to handle our four phone lines.

I've configured four Asterisk servers before and expected things to go smoothly. My first problem was that my last server was a version 1.2 and the newer version of Asterisk made several config file changes, causing very strange problems in my dialplan.

The next problem was that no matter what, caller-id service almost never reported the incoming number. After banging my head against the wall over and over trying to get the Ubuntu Hardy Asterisk packages to work with various configs, I finally took a stab in the dark and downloaded the latest zaptel sources from Digium and compiled them. A quick reboot and all the incoming caller-id worked beautifully.