Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

The standard installation of Ubuntu 11.10 doesn’t provide a graphical tool to edit user groups. For this you need:
$ sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools
$ users-admin

I’ve been using both Firefox and Chrome on different machines over the past year or so. In an effort to consolidate, I’ve been running Chrome rather than Firefox lately and a few issues have come up. On my laptop, installing an extension hangs after clicking the “Install” button. The text of the button changes to “Checking…” and stays that way. The fix seems to be to add a directory in your home called Downloads.

The HTPC mysteriously failed this week. After selecting a load in Grub, it complained it couldn’t read init files. I tried loading the Ubuntu live on USB, but that wouldn’t load. Then on boot-up it would say “error: hd0 out of disk.” At first, I thought this was a problem with the USB load, but that worked on another computer. I changed the SATA mode in BIOS from AHCI to IDE and then the USB would load. It seems the USB wouldn’t load in AHCI mode and the “out of disk” error was coming from the hard disk, as without the USB drive inserted, that’s what I started seeing. Now it’s looking like a hard disk failure.

After Ubuntu booted from the USB drive, I opened a terminal and ran sudo fsck /dev/sda1. It found a bunch of errors, which I told it to fix.

On reboot, “error: sd0 out of disk.” Reloading from USB again, I ran the disk utility and looked at the SMART data for the drive. It showed 48 bad sectors, which is no big deal. The other parameters looked OK, so I ran the extensive self-test. As it was running, I noticed the read error count was 720,900! I think this disk needs to get replaced.

We got Ooma about a month ago. I connected it to one telephone to try it out before porting our phone number. Since all went well, I started the port last week. It was completed today. After we got an email telling us the port was done, the telephone connected to Ooma had our old landline number on it and worked fine. The rest of the house connected to FiOS could still dial out, but, of course, could not receive calls.

To hook up the rest of the house, I had to disconnect the house service from FiOS. This was done at the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) box, which is mounted to the outside of my house next to the electric meter:

To open it, I removed one screw on the right side and opened the two snaps. They were clearly labeled. Inside the ONT, the phone line (the blue and white wires) were connected to a plastic jack that kinda looks like a phone jack:

To open it, I pulled the bottom tab (where the blue and white wires go in) toward me. It pops out maybe 40 degrees. This freed the blue and white wires, which I pulled out and labeled “do not connect”. I also labeled the wires “left” and “right” in case I ever need to put them back. That was it for FiOS.

To get the rest of the house on Ooma, I disconnected the test telephone from the Ooma Telo and replaced it with an RJ-11 splitter. I plugged the telephone I just disconnected into one half of the splitter and connected the wall jack that used to be connected to FiOS into the other half. That was it!

This is a Linux blog, so these instructions are for Linux. You can do the same thing without Linux, either by copying the app list file, below, with your computer or moving the SD card between Android devices.

In the Android Market, download AppListBackup. This program saves a list (or subset) of your loaded apps to a file that you can use to reload the apps, either on the same device or a different one. It doesn’t load apps, just lists of apps. There aren’t any instructions, so here’s what you do:

On the device you’re moving from, run AppListBackup, select “Backup” and check off which apps you want on the new device. When it’s done, connect the device by USB and on your computer, run
adb pull /mnt/sdcard/AppListBackup/apps.alb .
(Don’t forget the trailing period.) This will download the app list to your current directory. ADB is the Android Debug Bridge. If you don’t already have it loaded, see the post Android Development Environment.

Load AppListBackup on the new device. Run it and save an app list. It doesn’t matter what apps are in the list, because we’re going to overwrite the list in a minute. The purpose is just to get AppListBackup to make it’s directory on the SD card. Once that’s done, connect the new device to USB and, on the computer, run
adb push apps.alb /mnt/sdcard/AppListBackup/
(don’t forget the trailing slash). Now the app list is on the new device. Disconnect the new device from USB and run AppListBackup. Select “Restore”. This will show your list of apps. If you select one, it’ll take you to the app’s download page in the Market.

I bought this phone yesterday from the Verizon kiosk at BJ’s Wholesale Club. Since I had a (since discontinued) new-every-two bonus, it was $250 with a two-year contract extension, rather than $300. What made the sale, however, was that there was no rebate nonsense!

This is my second day with this phone and I’m really liking it. My previous phone is an origianl Motorola Droid. So far, I don’t miss the hardware keyboard. Although this phone is wider and taller, it’s thinner and weighs less than my Droid (5.3 oz. vs. 6 oz.), making it feel much lighter. It feels much less obtrusive in my pocket, which surprised me.

Some folks have complained the 4.65″ screen is too big for them to operate one handed. This might be true, but I’ve always held the phone in one hand and used the interface with the other.

4G is very fast. I have FiOS 15/5 at home and this is quicker than that. Upload and download speeds are about the same, rather than tiered.

There’s a WiFi tether, but Verizon has borked it so you need to purchase a tether plan. It seems possible to root it and use android-wifi-tether, but I haven’t tried.

Scrolling is very smooth. At times, I think it’s an iPhone. The phone never seems to be working hard.

Reception is about the same as my Droid, maybe not quite as good. I have the misfortune to work in a building that’s a cell dead zone. Throughout the day, the phone will be able to sneak some data in, but it’s not reliable enough for actual use. The Droid on CyanogenMod would eventually give up trying to find a signal. I’d have to cycle it through airplane mode to get it to pick up the signal again once I got outside. The Nexus has the same problem, but it takes longer to get in and out of airplane mode. Earlier today, it got stuck trying to get into airplane mode and I had to restart it.

The notification light (for new email or text, etc.) is a little odd. It’s a white light in the bottom-center of the screen and only turns on when the phone is asleep. It blinks once every eight seconds, which is way too slow. At the general suggestion of a few Nexus forums, I downloaded LightFlow, which can change the color and frequency of the light by notification type. So far so good, but it has some permissions that make me nervous.

The car dock isn’t as nice as the Droid’s. I’d prefer if it clipped in. This one you smoosh into a rubber bezel. Once in the dock, the phone does not go into a car mode. Also, when making or receiving a call, it doesn’t go into speaker mode. That’s really inconvenient.

The USB charger fits in easily, which is a big improvement over the Droid. The Droid’s charger was so finicky to connect that I got the home dock just to make connecting to power easier.

To flip between editing buffers in Emacs:
Next buffer:  <Ctrl>x<right arrow>
(While holding down the Control key, type “x” then the right arrow key)
Previous buffer <Ctrl>x<left arrow>

To increase font size: <Ctrl>x+
(While holding down the control key type “x”, then “+”)
To decrease font size: <Ctrl>x-

It’s been a while since I ran Tip On Discount with the Android SDK, so I loaded up a fresh copy of Eclipse and the SDKs. The project had all kinds of issues locating the Android libraries. The fix is to make sure project properties has the Android build set correctly, then run Android Tools -> Fix Project Properties, then Refresh the project.

After that, the project built, but when I tried to run it in an AVD, Eclipse complained my project had errors, though there were none. The cause of that was an old configuration in ~/.android. Deleting that directory try fixed the problem.

Lexmark’s customer support says there’s no way to turn off the messages about finding USB printers their printer daemon is filling up my logs with. I don’t have a way to fix that either, but a band-aid fix is the have logrotate shuffle the logs. As part of the standard configuration, the logs are renamed and compressed. Although this will shorten the length of time covered in the logs, it does free up a lot of space. Logrotate normally runs as a cron job and won’t rotate the logs more than once a day. But you can force it to do so:
$ sudo logrotate --force /etc/logrotate.conf