After the Install: setting up a desktop Ubuntu box (Gutsy 7.10)

This is roughly the procedure I use to set up a box for someone new to Ubuntu who'd like to use it right away.
Estimated time: 1 hour on fast DSL connection. Anyone who knows automation procedures would be my friend.

Software Sources:

• Ubuntu Software tab: Untick CD as a source
• Tick all other sources
• Third Party tab: Tick partner
• Updates tab: change Automatic updates to Download all updates in the background
• Statistics tab: tick Submit statistical information

Add/Remove:

• ubuntu-restricted-extras
• kubuntu-restricted-extras
• Amarok
• DeVeDe
• Xine
• VLC
• Flickr Uploader
• Gmail notifier
• Audacity
• Bluefish (Quanta Plus installs confusing extras into other menus)
• Mplayer
• Streamcast
• Scite text editor
• KmyMoney
• Inkscape
• Scribus
• Dia
• Wine

The above will take care of multimedia plugins, KDE, msttcorefonts, and enabling any other necessary repositories beyond Canonical.

Medibuntu:

Peripherals:

• System → Administration → Restricted Drivers Manager
• Check monitor settings in System → Administration → Screens and Graphics
• Check wireless if applicable
• Set up any nearby printers, print test page
• test nearby USB devices
• Make sure System → Preferences → Keyboard is configured for proper keyboard

Themes:

sudo apt-get install blubuntu-look peace-look tropic-look

Appearance:

• Change Theme to Blubuntu (note ramifications for OpenOffice)
• Change Application/Document/Desktop/Window title fonts to DejaVu Sans Condensed
• If monitor known, alter Rendering accordingly
• Test Visual Effects

Time and Date Settings:

• Set Time Zone
• Configuration: Keep synchronized with Internet servers (install NTP)

Wine:

• In Firefox, find vcredist_x86.exe on microsoft.com and install
  (this 2Mb download adds a handful of runtime libraries not handled by Wine)
  

OpenOffice:

• View: change icon set back to Human
• Java: make sure OOo finds JVM
• Fonts: substitute the following:
• Helvetica → FreeSans
• Bookman → URW Bookman L
• Avant Garde → URW Gothic L
• Century Gothic → URW Gothic L
• Optima → MgOpen Cosmetica
• Zapf Chancery → URW Chancery L
• Palatino → URW Palladio L
• Palatino Linotype → URW Palladio L
• Book Antiqua → URW Palladio L

GRUB:

• If dualboot, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst accordingly to correct default boot, hiddenmenu on

File Sharing:

• Create temp folder on desktop, turn on sharing and install both NFS/Samba sharing

Passing it on:

• Go to ubuntuforums.org and bookmark it to toolbar
• Use CD burning app to copy install disc to desktop, check MD5 sum:
  9a4ae3cfd68911a861d094ec834c9b48 *ubuntu-7.10-alternate-i386.iso
d2334dbba7313e9abc8c7c072d2af09c *ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso

Final checklist:

• GRUB hides menu
• Firefox (internet works)
• Sound card plays
• Audio CDs autoplay in correct player
• Audio CD burning app works
• DVDs autoplay in correct player (may have to be changed to VLC)
• Trash emptied

Getting Wine to run some of those pesky Windows apps

If you've seen this error when trying to run some Win apps you've installed...
err:module:import_dll Library MSVCP80.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\windows\\system32\\daz-qt-mt.dll") not found
err:module:import_dll Library MSVCR80.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\windows\\system32\\daz-qt-mt.dll") not found
Download and install this to make things all better.

Notes to myself on laptop hacks necessary after Gutsy upgrade.

/etc/acpi/suspend.d/55-down-interfaces.sh had to be edited to move the pccardctl eject line to the end of the file, otherwise resume after suspend doesn't bring the wireless back up.

In general, the update worked pretty well. In the car this afternoon, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea for config files to be flagged in such a way that editing them triggered a 'diary' dialog which encapsulated a diff between it and the previous version, and requested a comment explaining it.

The idea is that after an upgrade or reinstall, you'd be able to track the hacks and customizations you've made.

Bringing new users to Linux: An Experiment In Progress

In the previous post I mentioned that the Dell Dimension that had been my original Myth master backend had outlived its usefulness. Since our home already has four desktops and two laptops (and an ancient PowerMac in mothballs), it was time to decommission the Dimension and find it a new home.

The Myth hardware (500Gb HD, Hauppauge tuner card, Atheros wifi card) were swapped out into the newer PC, and the original extra cards (Sound Blaster, modem) were put back into it, and after a few glitches it was able to have Gutsy Gibbon installed on its internal 8.5Gb HD. The original intention was to put it up for the taking on the local Freecycle board, but I remembered a friend of ours had had her desktop fried in an electrical storm a year ago and still hadn't replaced hers. When I suggested she take this one, she agreed.

• The goal: get a non-power user Windows user comfortable with using Ubuntu Linux in her home for web browsing, media playback, etc.
  
• The parameters: an ancient PC with a 450MHz PIII, 512Mb RAM, 8.5Gb HD, TNT nVidia graphics card predating most OpenGL extensions, Sound Blaster card, and a CD burner. Gutsy Gibbon.
  
• What I preinstalled: Flash, Java, media codecs, VLC, XMMS, Streamcast, MSTTcorefonts, GnuCash, Gimp, Inkscape, Flickr Uploader, Gmail tickler, XGalaga, a user account for me and a user account for her (both with sudo access). If her kindergartener/1st grader need accounts they can get non-admin accounts.
  
• What else I did: I uninstalled the nvidia-glx-legacy driver, because it disables resolution above 800x600 on the monitor I was using. Added OpenOffice quicklauncher to top bar and ensured OO was aware of the JVM installed.
  

Observations: Gutsy was less problematic than I expected for something built for Windows ME in 1999, given Ubuntu's habit of dropping the ball on backwards compatibility with some kinds of hardware. Still, this hardware is running the latest Ubuntu Linux whereas the latest release of Windows would be impossible.

Assuming she's happy with basic usage, this should be a decent workstation for a while longer. Updates as they occur.

Myth progress report

In the past month I picked up an 800MHz GX260 Optiplex for $75 from Campus Surplus and successfully built it into a slave backend for my Myth system. A slave backend is a frontend which has its own tuner. If you only want to watch recordings from the frontend but don't need to watch live TV, all you need to build is a frontend.

Something perplexed me about this rig once it was built. It could watch recordings from the master backend without the irritating freeze every five seconds we had come to expected from playback on the MBE's own frontend. The chief difference between the two machines was that the MBE was a 450MHz PIII Dell Dimension and the SBE is an 800MHz Celeron. Not being a complete idiot, I concluded that a faster CPU on the MBE would resolve the freeze problem.

Yesterday, I picked up another identically configured Optiplex GX260 in the same place, this one for $50 (they weren't moving fast enough at $75, apparently), and today I performed the necessary surgery to put the MBE's guts into the GX260. Well, nearly all the guts. I figured the nVidia TNT2 from the Clinton administration wasn't worth moving to the new machine, even if it had integrated Intel graphics. If they were good enough for playback on the SBE, they ought to be good enough for the MBE.

After rebooting, everything worked... almost. The graphics wouldn't load, even after commenting out the nVidia device in xorg.conf. I ended up copying the appropriate section from the SBE's xorg.conf and it was good to go. Unfortunately, the IR didn't work. This wasn't new: LIRC is often the most fragile part of the Myth ecosystem, and kernel updates have killed it before. In those rare cases, redoing the make/make install process has quickly fixed it. Not this time. Searching dmesg revealed an interesting error:
[ 48.302736] lirc_i2c: no version for "lirc_unregister_plugin" found: kernel tainted.
Taints usually refer to proprietary stuff in the kernel. The wifi card I'm using is Atheros-based, and the kernel driver taints the kernel. But so does the nVidia driver I neglected to remove.

Update: that message is always in dmesg, but I hadn't realized it. The real source of the problem was the nvidia-glx-legacy driver that no longer applied and needed to be removed. Once it was, LIRC started working again just fine.

The only remaining problem has to do with the multiple tuners across backends. The system is vaguely aware of the SBE's tuner, but never uses it: when the SBE is tuning live channels, it's actually using the MBE's tuner. Giving separate names to the tuners doesn't seem to have fixed it.

Modernized iMac redux

Long story short: the single mom for whom I rebuilt an iMac as a Dapper Kubuntu box no longer needs it (she inherited a 17" iBook) and gave it to me to do with as I saw fit.

I reformatted it as a Feisty Ubuntu box to see if the experiment was still worth doing. Remember, this is a souped iMac with a G4 and half a gig RAM. Its video card isn't worth writing home about, but hopefully that shouldn't be an issue. If the experiment is a success, the iMac is going up on the local freecycle.

Getting it to a desktop-friendly state post-install consisted of the usual PPC hurdle: multimedia support. Fortunately in the time since the last install of April 2006, the PPCcodecs package was written to complement w32codecs, Gnash became a viable product, and IBM updated their PPC JVM to 1.50. As of this writing, it goes without saying that an Ubuntu install should include adding Medibuntu repositories, and especially so for non-x86 architectures. Helix is still not ready as a total replacement solution for the 2005 RealPlayerGold PPC release, so I ended up using RPG10.5 instead with good results.

Ubuntu's conception of what makes a good baseline desktop is close, but not close enough IMHO. I added Inkscape to complement GIMP, and GnuCash because it should be included with any desktop-oriented distro. If it's good, it deserves more attention, and if it's mediocre, it deserves enough attention to pester the developers to improve it. VLC is the Swiss Army knife of multimedia.

With these packages installed, I set the machine to upgrade itself to the most recent Gutsy, for a few reasons. One, it pushes the envelope on what this Mac can and cannot do, but more importantly it will highlight some possibly incorrect assumptions on the part of the Ubuntu developers. Feisty does not correctly detect networking on boot with some PPC machines, because they changed out some packages; I'd like to see if Gutsy fixes this. Gutsy by default uses Compiz/Beryl; this iMac is incapable of desktop effects and I want to see if the installer is smart enough to detect it and drop back to regular desktop compositing. Gutsy by default includes a PDF printer device; the libraries necessary to do this in Feisty are deprecated.

Unfortunately for me, Gutsy (even three weeks from the official deployment date) is not ready for primetime on PPC:

1. The kernel no longer recognizes all IDE drives by default. initram-fs/module had to be amended to modprobe ide_core and initramfs rebuilt to boot the HD
2. a core mathematics library (used by Sound control panel) which prior to Gutsy recalled that G3s don't have AltiVec was carelessly rewritten to assume AltiVec. It had to be downgraded to the previous version.
3. Special and foreign keyboards are reporting all kinds of recognition problems.
4. Wired network still not being detected on startup.
   

I'm reinstalling Feisty and waiting for favorable reports from PPC Ubuntu users. Longterm, support for PPC has issues:

• Kernel developers appear to be working with late-model equipment and ignoring/forgetting about first-generation NewWorld hardware specs. From a company where the CEO has an iMac on his desktop, this is either troubling or amusing.
• Applet technologies are increasingly not being serviced by their vendors but open-source cloners. While this shouldn't be an issue for the world of GNU/Linux, installation is not always trivial.
• Multimedia support seems to be becoming more complicated than it was in Dapper.
  

IBM has a vested interest in supporting Linux on PPC, even if they've functionally ended their relationship with non-Cell desktop PPC architecture. One of Debian's strengths is that it serves most architectures no matter how arcane they are. Ubuntu, OTOH, is a business and I can grudgingly understand their need to focus support on live desktop architectures (although ruling out ARM is probably a mistake). It may sound like dogma, but it's a strength to support multiple architectures.

Conclusions: installing Feisty is not a bad move on this Mac. However, upgrading to Gutsy is a wait and see situation given the number of balls dropped.

Add XML editing support for Apple's PLIST to Dreamweaver CS3

Dreamweaver, unlike pretty much every other XML editor I've used, actually reads the DTD line in XML files and automatically imports the rules for the document even if it's on the Internet.

\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Dreamweaver CS3\configuration\DocumentTypes\MMDocumentTypes.xml is the document which configures document type by extension for DW, so scroll down to the line that begins with <documenttype id="XML"... and look for the winfileextension and macfileextension attributes. Add plist to the comma-delimited list of extensions in both attribute values, save and restart DW.

Now, when you edit a .plist file, DW will read the DTD and you can edit it with autocomplete for all the correct tags and attributes.

Inkscape for U3

Yes, it can be done.

• Get PackageFactory For U3.
• Download the standalone Inkscape for Windows archive and 7-Zip to unpack it to your desktop (thanks to PenDriveApps for the link).
• Open the folder; it should look like this (without the colors and annotations).
  

• Drag the Inkscape.exe (not Inkview.exe) icon to the DROP EXE space, but do not click the CREATE! button. Click Advanced Mode... instead.
  
• Add files and folders to the appropriate PackageFactory folders as marked above and go back to the Summary tab.
• Click Create a U3P File... and be prepared to wait while it packages the application. Save it to your desktop.
• Add it to your U3 drive from the Launchpad's Add Programs (Install From My Computer). Expect it to take up to five minutes; this ends up using over 200Mb on your U3 pendrive.
• You're good to go!