Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I read through the openSUSE wireless networking forum for clues as to why NetworkManager wouldn’t connect to my wireless network. There wasn’t anything related to my problem. I could connect, but only using nm-applet. The KDE NetworkManager clients all failed. It seemed like they would forget any security settings I gave them.
Knowing that upgrades are error-prone (why do I still hope they’ll work?), I loaded a fresh install of openSUSE 11.1 on the third Pinto partition. Now knetworkmanager works fine. But I’ve got a new decision. Do I move in to the new openSUSE or see if the latest Fedora will play nice with my ThinkPad T60?
openSUSE 11.1 is much quicker than 10.2 and I like how KDE 4 looks with it. However, I’ve never warmed up to openSUSE’s application launcher menu. I haven’t figured out how to navigate it with just the keyboard and things are rarely where I tend to look for them. And 11.1 does this funky think with the Intel 945GM graphics card that causes garbage to appear on the screen during X11 start and graphical log in. It’s only momentary and causes no harm, but it doesn’t look nice. Lastly, all the other computers in the house (other than the OLPC XO’s) are running Fedora and that would make administration easier. The issue with Fedora? The last release I used didn’t hibernate properly. Since IBM distributed openSUSE with ThinkPads, that was the reason I tried it. It worked and I’ve been running it since.

Of course WiFi didn’t work. It never works. My configuration had two entries for each of my Ethernet and Wireless Ethernet cards and the firewall complained eth0 was part of the internal and external zones. The latter I fixed by editing /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2. The former I fixed with Yast2/Network Devices/Network Settings. I banged my head against the wall trying to get the key accepted until, on the wireless key page, I clicked WEP keys (even though there was a field for the WEP key there). On this screen, I was able to set the key length from 128 to 64 and then it worked. I still have the horrible name for the wireless interface of wlan0_rename_re, but at least it works.
Update: I spoke too soon. This morning, my wife started the laptop and it didn’t connect to the network. So I messed with it and noticed the interface names are normal again–wlan0 and eth0. I tried traditional (ifup) connections and couldn’t get them to work. After switching to NetworkManager, suddenly it connected. I still have no idea why this didn’t work before or why it started working. But inspiring confidence is why you read this blog, eh?
Update 2: The only application that will get NetworkManager to connect is nm-applet, the Gnome client. It seems to recognize that my WEP key is a 40-bit, not 64 or 128 bit. The KDE clients all fail to connect. NetworkManager will only connect if I run nm-applet, even though I set up the connection as root. More investigation is necessary.

Before upgrading, it’s useful to have the partition layout written down. Here’s Pinto’s (from parted’s “print” command):

1 32.3kB 14.0GB 14.0GB primary ntfs , , , , , , , , , type=07, ,
3 17.2GB 18.2GB 1045MB primary ext3 boot, , , , , , , , , type=83, ,
4 18.2GB 54.7GB 36.4GB extended , , , , , , , , , type=05, ,
5 18.2GB 20.4GB 2147MB logical linux-swap , , , , , , , , , type=82, ,
6 20.4GB 31.1GB 10.7GB logical ext3 , , , , , , , , , type=83, ,
7 31.1GB 41.8GB 10.7GB logical ext3 , , , , , , , , , type=83, ,
8 41.8GB 52.6GB 10.7GB logical ext3 , , , , , , , , , type=83, ,
2 54.7GB 60.0GB 5342MB primary fat32 , , , , , , , , , type=12, ,

This is what’s on each of them (in partition order):

1. Windows
2. ThinkPad Recovery partition
3. Boot partition (/boot)
4. Extended partion (contains logical partitions 5-8)
5. swap
6. Fedora Core 5
7. Fedora Core 6
8. openSUSE 10.2

Rather than leave Pinto in a non-working state, I chose to copy the openSUSE 10.2 partition (/dev/sda8) over the old Fedora Core 5 partition (/dev/sda6) and upgrade that.
I have only one boot partition. When the upgrade runs, it’ll replace the kernel files for the installation being upgraded. Since I want to keep my current kernel, this is bad. To remedy this, I copied all the files with the current kernel version to a backup area to be restored later:
# cd /boot
# mkdir opensuse-10.2
# cp -p grub/menu.lst opensuse-10.2/.
# cp -p *2.6.18.8* opensuse-10.2/.
Then I copied the current installation’s partition with the GParted Live CD. This is required because copying a partition while in use is a bad idea. When running from the CD the partitions aren’t in use.
But GParted wouldn’t copy the partition for me, so I used the Live CD’s terminal and my older partion copying instructions:
# dd if=/dev/hdb8 of=/dev/hda6 bs=1024k
# tune2fs -L opensuse-11.1 /dev/hda6
# resize2fs /dev/hda6
Alas, although I tried to have all three partitions the same size, they are slightly different (according to GParted, sda6=10237 MiB, sda7=10237 MiB and sda8=10245)
and resize2fs wanted e2fsck run first. e2fsck complained the filesystem size and the physical sizeh were different. So I switched gears.
The first order was to get these partitions equal. Using GParted, I resized sda8 to match sda6 and sda7 at 10237 MiB.
There are three 10GB partitions for Linux on Pinto. I’m only using openSUSE 10.2, leaving the other two, Fedora Core 5 and 6 free. So the plan was updated to put an image of sda8 on sda7 and restore it to sda6.
Using GParted, I formatted /dev/sda7 as ext3
From the command line, I mounted it:
# mkdir /mnt/sda7
# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/sda7
I saved an image of /dev/sda8 to /mnt/sda7/sda8.img with partimage, which is also on the GParted Live CD. This took about 12 minutes.
Then using GParted, I formatted /dev/sda6 as ext3.
Using partimage, I restored the image /mnt/sda7/sda8.img.000 to /dev/sda6.
Next I used GParted to edit the label of the new partition copy. If you forget this step, anything referencing the old label may use the new copy, as both partitions have the same label. Then I mounted the boot partition (/dev/sda3) and edited the grub menu /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst, copied the current openSUSE entry and changed the title from openSUSE 10.2 to openSUSE 11.1 and root from /dev/sda8 to LABEL=opensuse-11.1.
To update the location of the new partion in the file system, I mounted the new opensuse-11.1 partition and edited /mnt/new/etc/fstab to change the entry for the root to point to the new partition, LABEL=opensuse-11.1.
I rebooted and made sure both copies of openSUSE still worked. For each, I ran df / to see that the correct file system was mounted (verified the label location as root with e2label /dev/sda6 and e2label /dev/sda8).
Perform the upgrade.
After the upgrade, I booted openSUSE 11.1 and edited the Grub configuration to restore the 10.2 entry and copied the backed up kernel files to /boot. One more reboot checked that the old 10.2 installation still worked.

Pinto, the Thinkpad T60 running openSUSE 10.2 gave me an error message when I tried to update it last week (or was it the week before?):

Cannot access installation media suse-oss102 CD 1. Check that the server is accessible.

I thought I told openSUSE to not use the CDs before. Turns out, I did. Although it wasn’t as easy as it should have been to figure out what happened, I did manage to find out that openSUSE 10.2 reached end-of-life on November 30, 2008 and the update servers were turned off. Why couldn’t they say that instead of “you don’t have your CDs.”

The current release of openSUSE is 11.1, so since the family is at the neighbors, it’s time for me to break things. >-)

I started with the openSUSE 11.1 installation DVD, downloaded via bittorrent. To print a cover for the slim CD case, I downloaded the CD art and printed it with these commands:

convert Front_back_th.png cd.eps
cdlabelgen --cover-image cd.eps \
--cover-image-scaleratio 1.1,0.0,0.0 \
--slim-case --no-date --output-file cd.ps

To check the output, run “ghostscript cd.ps”
To print, “lp cd.ps”

The download will take a while, so I’ll continue this post later

I’ve got Sound Juicer (listed on the Fedora 9 menu under Applications/Sound & Video/Audio CD Extractor or command line sound-juicer) able to rip CDs as MP3s for my daughters’ Sansa Shaker and M240 MP3 players.  They asked me to put a CD on their players for them.  Actually, they asked me to put a half dozen CDs on their players.  Rather than sign up as the family audio technician, I’d rather teach the elder to do it.  I told her I’d get things ready for her and off she bounded to watch “How to Eat Fried Worms”.

I started Sound Juicer and went to Edit/Preferences on the menu.  Under Output formats, there was only  FLAC, Ogg, and Speex.  I couldn’t remember how I got MP3 ripping enabled and this box is Fedora 8, not 9, so I went to Fedora FAQ 8:

1. Follow steps in Configuring Yum
2. Install GStreamer MP3 Drivers (under Rhythmbox)

Then MP3 was available as an output option, so I set that and ripped Hannah Montana (ugh).

Since Sansa players organize music by MP3 tag, I needed to check that these were correctly set.  There are many ID3 tag editors.  I happen to use Kid3.   Thankfully, the tags set by Sound Juicer were fine.  Except they were in version 2 (ID3v2) format and the  Sansa M240 uses version 1 (ID3v1) tags.  (The Shaker doesn’t have a screen, so it’s OK for that one).  This meant that the music was playable but in the M240 menus, it all shows up as “unknown”.  To fix with Kid3, I selected all the tracks with Ctrl-A and clicked “From Tag 2” and Save.

The oddest thing started happening about a week ago. When I sign on to Lotus Domino Web Access (Lotus Notes over the web) and create a new message, pressing either Fn, function keys, page up, page down, home, end, Windows key or the arrow keys in the message editor pops up a Del.icio.us “Save A Bookmark” dialog. This happens in Firefox under Linux and Windows.

I tried loading the Delicious plug-in for Internet Explorer as a test and it said this:

This update has two important changes, so please upgrade now!
1) Fix for a problem in the previous release that sometimes resulted
in being blocked from Delicious.
2) New feature that allows Delicious keyboard shortcuts
customization via a preferences dialog.

That second feature raised an eyebrow. So I didn’t load that, keeping Delicious v1.10|b269. No problems with Domino. Then I let the upgrade install, giving me Delicious v1.11|b272. That wasn’t broken either. So it looks to be specific to the Firefox plug-in.

In Firefox I went to Tools/Delicious Options, Keyboard shortcuts tab and checked “Keep the standard Firefox bookmarks keyboard shortcuts”. This didn’t help, so I unchecked it.

Next, I disabled the Delicious plug-in (Tools/Add-ons menu) and restarted Firefox. No problem with Domino.  Re-enabling it brought the problem back.

Next, I went to the Advanced tab and clicked “Switch to Classic Mode”.  Still broken.