Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

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.

As root:

# mkdir /usr/share/fonts/somefont
# cp somefont.ttf /usr/share/fonts/somefont
# fc-cache -v -f

I’ve been using gPodder to manage podcasts on my Fuze. It’s a really nice Python program (for Linux and Nokia tablets, but has run on Mac and Windows) and comes closest to doing what I want as anything I’ve tried. There were a few things that didn’t work optimally on my Fuze. The first was that the Album tag isn’t set on Podcasts. This isn’t a bug, but more of a quirk of how the Fuze organizes podcasts–maybe you could call it a bug, or maybe we should blame the podcasters for not getting their tags right. The Fuze groups podcasts by album tag, not artist or title. gPodder won’t mess with the ID tags in files by default, but there’s an option to set them. Unfortunately, this option only sets the Title and Artist tags, so the Fuze lumps all the podcasts in the “unknown” group. As any self-respecting geek would, I looked at the source and modified it to set the album tag to the title tag if the album tag is blank.  This change will be included in version 0.13.1.

Next was album art. I suppose most people don’t care if there’s a picture next to their podcast, but I like them. Album art is pretty poorly supported for non-iPods in everything I’ve used. The documentation for gPodder didn’t say anything about this, so I looked through the source and found an option for Rockbox cover art.  At the time, I didn’t know what Rockbox was, but since have learned it’s open source firmware for MP3 players.  I love the idea of being able to change the code running my Fuze, but alas, Rockbox doesn’t support it.  I digress.  The important thing is that the Rockbox option will copy the podcast album art (that gPodder already downloads) to the folder on the Fuze where it stores the podcast files.  It calls the file cover.bmp and converts it to BMP format.   The only options are to enable this and the maximum image size.  The Fuze needs a file called folder.jpg in JPEG format.  So I added some options for generic MP3 players that let you specify the file name, format and image size of cover art.   This change has been checked in to the code repository, and will probably be in version 0.14.

I’ve got Amarok transferring and transcoding music to my Sansa Fuze. However the cover art that it gets from the Internet is not transferred. I haven’t completely figured this out yet, but there are some ideas as to how to do this. This script works for my Fuze with modifications:

coversdir="/media/SANSA FUZE/MUSIC"

database=sqlite

line 80:

convert "$inputfile" -resize 176x176 "$coversdir"/"$artist"/"$album"/folder.jpg

The Zenworks management daemon chews up lots of CPU to the point of bringing my Thinkpad T60 to a grinding halt. The OpenSUSE community recommends disabling it. It seems I’m not the only one who has issues with ZMD.

I just noticed there’s a run button on the script manager in Amarok. I selected Transcogg and pressed run. It popped up a message saying it needs mp3gain. OK done. Then it wanted mpg123. This wasn’t available in the Add/Remove Software program. There was a mpg321 though. The homepage of mpg321 says it’s a free replacement for mpg123. OK, I loaded that. I stopped and reran Transcogg–no pop-ups. Upon transfer the status line at the bottom of Amarok says not playable on device. The firmware for the Fuze supporting OGG is less than a week old–maybe there’s a configuration for the Fuze that’s telling Amarok that it only plays MP3s. Something else was different this time. I plugged in the Fuze and Amarok connected automatically instead of me having to hit the Connect button. In the configuration for the device, now the transcode before transferring to device option was enabled, so I checked it. I clicked transfer and whattaya know, it worked!