One more thing... TuxGuitar.

I forgot one little thing.

As with every frickin' upgrade, TuxGuitar is broken again.

No output through any of the eight or so possible listed midi outputs in the settings - sound section of TuxGuitar.

So... I will look into it on Sunday when I have time and report back to you when I fix it.

Good luck!


Peace Out.

Ubuntu 9.10 - New ways to break things!

USEFUL SOLUTION IN THIS POST - REALLY EASY!! IT'S AFTER THE RANT!!!


Sorry I haven't had much to say of late.


Ubuntu 9.10 came out late last month and as the '.10' releases are usually a bit buggy I though it better to wait about , oh, a month for the nasties to be ironed out more or less so that the experience would be less painful than last time.

Last time it was like being ass-raped by a sexually frustrated silver-back gorilla with no lube. Not good, in other words.

This time it was like being gang raped by the same gorilla and his buddies who are into fisting.


Here's what broke:

• Video: Couldn't get past the text section of the boot sequence - screen was flickering enough to make an epileptic fit.
• NFS: All remote NFS mounts were rejected with an error
• Sound: No sound. No sound card detected.
• Video 2: Couldn't install the Nvidia specific drivers to use my super-dooper video card.
• Video 3: No playback of any video file.
• And I'm sure there is more that I didn't detect, but that lot was bad enough.

I spent a lot of time stuffing around with all kinds of interesting and complicated solutions, removing things, adding things, compiling from source.


And you know what fixed all of it?

sudo update-grub

THEN! choose "install package maintainer's version" and allow it to overwrite any customisations you have.

If you have customisations, back them up some how so you can reinsert them after the change.

Otherwise, taste sweet success. Install custom hardware drivers, listen to music, watch movies, enjoy your NFS mounts and be happy.

And go fist a gorilla.


Cheers!!

Moblock - PeerGuardian for Ubuntu and others.

Recently I used Azureus to download some free content - some wallpapers, some Linux ISOs and some old text files.

Long after I had finished that, I noticed that something kept knocking on the closed port on which Azureus (Vuze) had been running. That's pretty usual as the trackers tend to do that until they have updated that you're no longer part of the swarm.

Normally, the address range of these connection attempts is pretty varied - all over the world and a wide, wide range of addresses. This time, the address range was very narrow - all in the same block. Obviously, this is abnormal.


After a quick bit of research, I read about PeerGuardian. It's an application which blocks inbound and outbound connection attempts based on a list of known unfriendly IP addresses and address ranges.


The equivalent for Ubuntu is Moblock. It's a mature project having originated in around 2006 and works well.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I recommend to go here: http://moblock-deb.sourceforge.net/ Download and installation methods are clearly explained and there is help available too. Not only is it available as a command line utility, it also comes with Mobloqeur - a pretty simple and effective GUI to allow you to get a good degree of control over the application.


Installed and configured, you will find it very useful in prohibiting unwanted connection attempts from all manner of creeps who want to see what you're doing.


Peace out!

USB Linux

So often, there are reasons to install Linux and so often there isn't a good and simple way to install it.

Want to do it the really easy way?

Here's how:

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

Try it.

You WILL love it.

Fast, simple and easy.

Hotmail and POP3

Getting Hotmail to work with mail clients in the past was a nightmare.

Under Ubuntu and Evolution it worked pretty well, sort of, then broke a few months before the final changeover.

I'm not going to reinvent the wheen, so just go check here:

http://lifehacker.com/5169684/hotmail-finally-enables-pop3-worldwide

This article explains very simply in one panel what you need to do to get your Hotmail messages integrated into your Evolution mail collection schedule.


Good luck and happy e-mailing!

Boring Ubuntu Goodness.

You know what?

Ubuntu is becoming a boring platform.

It's stable. Mostly.

For the most part, a month or two after the release most of the major niggles are gone and so are most of the minor ones.

It's scary!

This is starting to feel something like the kind of major OS release that is expected to come from a major corporation listed on the NASDAC (NASCAR?) or NYSE or some other pretend bourse. It works. Rather well. It works rather better than the 'other' offering which is so very expensive and costly. And it's neither expensive or costly.

If you're an end-user, consider working harder for a moment to understand how it works and how much you can save the environment and your pocket by changing OS.

If you're a corporate boss, consider the above - but increase that cost of change by the factor of the number of employees who would need training to make the change.


There is much talk of being 'greener', much talk of saving the planet.

Start with your OS.

Save the planet. Save yourself. The easiest way.

Cheers!! T.

PS Reverend Kris Korda previously suggested that the best way to save the planet was to kill yourself. While the Reverend was rather close to the best solution, this one is likely to have a higher uptake than the one the Reverend suggested and therefore a bigger effect. On the other hand, the one which was suggested about the second coming sounds like rather a good plan. T.

More on overclocking your Nvidia graphics card

In an earlier article, I mentioned ways to overclock your Nvidia graphics card in Ubuntu 9.04.

There is one more detail you will need.

Normally, when you restart the system, the overclocking settings will be lost.

Here's how to fix that:

Open a terminal and type "gnome-session-properties"
Add a new item
Call it 'nvclock'
The command is 'nvclock -b coolbits -n 575.000 -m 999.000' in my case.

The -n is the GPU speed and the -m is the memory speed.

Therefore your system will now start with an overclocked graphics card.

If you're using this command in a shell, there may be an error if you are trying to push your card further than the 'known' safe limits. You can add the '-f' switch to force the overclocking, both at the command line and in the gnome-session-properties panel. Sometimes, nvclock doesn't correctly identify the card. If you're sure you know better, then you make the choice. It identified my GTX260 as a standard edition rather than a special overclock edition. Therefore, I forced the settings.

Remember, some parameters may be too extreme and damage your hardware.

Peace out...

Overclocking CPU, Overclocking Nvidia display cards and fans.

It has been a while since I did any overclocking of CPUs. I got into a little bit in the heyday of it all, but didn't have the time and couldn't be bothered wasting the money on the exotic cooling systems available to get more performance out of my CPU.

After all, CPU prices fall quite quickly and cooling gear is more costly than CPUs. Not to mention that the cooling gear you buy today won't (or probably won't) fit or have adapter plates etc available for the CPU you replace it with in a year or so.

The approach of unbridled overclocking is a waste of money in my opinion. However, if that's your hobby, if it's your thing then that's just cool. It's not my thing.

For me, overclocking is about using older or lower cost hardware and making it go a little quicker so that it's able to give more than the task at hand needs. After all, why drive a 1.3 litre buzzbox when a 1.8 will use about the same fuel if it's properly tuned and carefully driven, but will give you ever so much more performance if and when you need it. Make sense?


There's one machine I tend to use the most just for surfing, e-mails, quotes, watching videos over my shoulder when I'm supposed to be working - just a general duties machine. Here's the config:

* AMD Opteron 144 CPU, stock 1.8 GHz
* Zalman CPU cooler with radial fins and a 90 mm fan
* 2 Gb DDR266 RAM
* Asus GTX260 overclocked display card
* 24" Fujitsu widescreen LCD
* 800 W modular power factor corrected PSU (sorry, forgot what kind and I can't be bothered to open the case right now - however, the fan is variable speed and 'runs on' until a temperature set-point is reached when the machine is switched off in software).
* 1 x 120 Gb PATA HDD for Boot
* 1 x 320 GB SATA HSS for my home folder
* 1 x 90 mm case fan
* CD-R burner
* DVD + - everything burner
* and a whole heap of other stuff hanging off the USB ports.

Yep - a rather plain office machine with a quick-ish graphics card. Legacy hardware for the most part.


As I mentioned, the CPU at stock runs 1.8 GHz. It's no prize winner - it's just fine for most day to day stuff under Ubuntu.

However, I wanted a little more grunt and didn't want to spend any more on it. So, a bit of quick overclocking in BIOS and we're on our way. I've boosted it to 2.3 GHz which is mild compared to some more serious Opteron 144 overclockers, however, I didn't want to spend more money on exotic cooling. The trick to remember is to set the overclocking to asynchronous. There's a big chance that you can drive the CPU and memory harder but that the bus may not be able to take as much pushing. Experiment at your own peril. I will.

The Zalman cooler has an external fan speed controller. Like most people, I believed faster is better so had it cranked up to maximum speed - about 2500 rpm. When the fan is running at maximum speed, initially the temperature is stable. I just installed some temperature monitoring software which I'll talk about in another article. I wanted to see what difference fan speed made to cooling.

With the fan at maximum speed and the CPU driven at 100% for an hour, the temperature peaked at 60C. However, dropping the fan to 1400 rpm the temperature fell to 38C after about ten minutes at about 25% load. Woot!

However, as soon as you put the CPU and GPU under load, the temperature will climb again. After half an hour the CPU temperature was 59C and stable.


As I've mentioned before, I've been twiddling with overclocking the display card and have mentioned nvclock-gtk. It has a setting which allows the fan duty cycle to be adjusted manually. I had set that at around 80% thinking faster fans, better cooling, etc. Wrong. Dead wrong.

Allow the fan speed to remain under automatic control. The duty cycle will vary as it needs. The result? 72C with the fan running fast and 63C with the fan on automatic. The duty cycle runs between about 35% and 85% under 100% load conditions on the CPU and the GPU but it remains pleasantly cool.


Result? Dropping the CPU fan speed and setting the GPU fan speed to automatic gives lower temperatures. Here's the results:
* Core 0 = 59
* CPU fan = 1394 rpm
* Sys Temp = 50C
* CPU Temp = 60C
* AUX 2 Temp (mobo) = 60C
* GPU = 67C
* Display Adapter Ambient = 55C
* both HDD = 52C.

In real terms, the air flow needs to be improved to cool this machine more effectively.


For me, all of the above is great news. My workstation and another server are under my corner desk here in the office. The highest temperature recorded under the desk in summer was 73C. BBQ pork legs - my legs!! There's no chance I could slide some fun under there.


I'm happy to help you get somewhere with a result for your rig. Comment or e-mail and I will help you.


Peace out...

Overclocking Nvidia GTX260... and others

As you know, this blog is basically a catalogue of the adventures I've had under Linux in whatever version is the current one at the time of writing.

Around October last year, as I was building my workstation up by adding a bigger monitor (24") I needed to add a bigger graphics card to get the most out of the monitor. After all, 1900 x 1200 at 24 bit depth is rather a lot of screen real estate to drive at a reasonable speed so that it's useful as a business / graphics workstation.

I ended up with an Asus GTX260, which is of course and Nvidia chipset display device. It wasn't a regular one, as far as I could tell, but a special version overclocked to 576 MHz on the GPU and 999 MHz on the memory. Not bad.

However, after a look at nvidia-settings, it seemed that I was only getting 300 MHz of speedy goodness. I bought something quicker and I wanted to find out how to make do that.

Here's how:

For most purposes, nvidia-settings is what you will need, in conjunction with the most recent properly supported drivers from Nvidia. By properly supported, I mean the ones that Ubuntu ships with the distro or upgrades to along the way. There are some issues that can come up if you go to a 'too new' version in that other stuff can break. Stay leading edge, not bleeding edge.

Nvidia-settings is pretty simple - it lets you adjust a few things here and there such as anisotropic filtering, texture, etc. That's all pretty nice.

However, if you add one more option to your xorg.conf, you can unlock the overclocking side of things if it is available for your card.

First off, sudo apt-get install nvclock. It's a powerful command line tool for overclocking. I'm not sure what interdependencies there are between nvidia-settings and nvclock in regard to overclocking, but it just seems to work. Try it. There are some pretty cool command line features available in nvclock, but only use those if you know what you're doing. If you make a mistake you can either weaken or destroy your display card and potentially other hardware in your system.

The option to change in your xorg.conf is to add the line:
"Options" "Coolbits" "1"
... and that's it.

This allows overclocking to be selected in nvidia-settings' graphical interface. You can find it in the section "Clock Frequencies". Tick "Enable Overclocking" and off you go! Make sure that you know the maximum GPU and Memory clock for your card and for your cooling configuration. A smart move is to allow Power Miser to run. It is enabled by default. This means your card only goes to its maximum speeds on demand. Saves power, saves heat. I won't tell you how to disable it - if you're that keen, practice your Google-fu my friend.

As this card is an overclocked version, it also displays that there are two more performance settings. Default is 0, faster is 1 and highest is 2. If your nvidia-settings shows you this kind of information, then you are lucky enough to know what maximum speeds you can safely set and forget. If that kind of information isn't shown, then do a little research for the quickest reliable settings for your board, subtract say 10% and work it up from there. If the high performance speed minus 10% is less than the 'stock' speed, overclocking may not be for your card. It's up to you.


You can often overclock a touch faster if you can run your system cooler.

Here's a sweet cheat to do that:
sudo apt-get install nvclock-gtk
... Easy!

Run nvclock_gtk from the command line. It's a GUI'ed app for overclocking. Don't touch the overclock part of it otherwise it will take away your adjustments from the changes you made in nvidia-settings.

The part we're interested in is the fan duty cycle. The normal fan duty cycle set for my card is 40%. Tweak it to say 80%. Fan RPM will increase, perhaps a minor increase in noise but you will notice your temperature begin to reduce. The graphics card's temperature is for the most part ruled by the ambient temperature inside your system case and is influenced by ambient temperature in the room where the system case is. Obvious, huh?

In my case, "nvclock -T" reports GPU temperature = 60C and Board Temperature = 49C. This is a drop of 3C in about four minutes or so. I can feel a bit more breeze around the case with my bare feet (it's a tower sitting on the floor under my desk) which I'm sure will be a welcome relief in summer.

Any questions? Ask and I will try to assist.


Peace out.

Speech to text...

So far, the most recent upgrade has, for the most part, been fairly OK.

Bluetooth still sucks the big red one. Howeverm what can be done with Bluetooth can be done with USB wired connections, and it actually works. More or less. YMMV, etc.

My next big goal is speech to text. I talk faster than I type and God knows I type rather quickly. So... as soon as I find some Ubuntu and Debian speech to text apps I will review those and post here for your amusement or edification.

In the meanwhile, here's a page for your amusement which is totally SFW, despite the gratuitous use of Japanese school girls and pussy.  http://www.ceilingcat.com/img/47aug29-smuggling-your-cat.jpg

Meh.

See you soon.

Ubuntu 9.04 and Bluetooth.

It doesn't work so well.

Which is funny because when I was testing 9.04 beta only a few weeks before the final release it did work, but caused some havoc with the Nvidia 188.xx drivers so I rolled back, looking forward to being able to happily sync my phone with Evolution.

Having done some research, I have found out that Bluetooth and 9.04 work OK but only with certain hardware. The bad news is that the hardware it works with is not so common in general. One of the most popular Bluetooth dongles (KY-BT100) doesn't work with bluez-gnome or bluezman.

If I get it going, I will let you know.

Free .co.cc domain names

You are not going to believe this stuff. Seriously.

The .co.cc domain is giving away domain names ending in .co.cc without the usual crap of tags and embedded things when you choose a domain name.

Some of the shorter and more obvious ones are either gone already or available for a fee.

Doesn't it sound rather like the common name for a male chicken? Isn't that something you can twist into something more commercial? Or at least genital? Go get your cocc into this. Heck - it's free! I'm not even an affiliate - I earn nothing from this - I just wanna give you a hot tip. Nothing required in return.

Check it out: http://www.co.cc/

I'm sure that some of you clever and dirty minded fxckers can find something that's deeeee-lish and profitable. I know I have.


Peace out.

HTPC solutions.

I love my semi-HTPC.

What's a semi-HTPC? It's like an HTPC, but not quite so hardcore.

I get really bad free to air television reception here. I can see the tower a couple of kilometres away from my lounge room and the building has a good antenna, but when they rewired it some time ago for digital TV some wit decided that the terminal in the master bedroom was more important than the one in the lounge room. I didn't like FTA-TV anyway, so it's no big loss. For these reasons, I didn't want to install tuners in my HTPC. Besides, there was no room in the case after I put all the hardware I wanted in there.

The most usual Linux based HTPC solution is MythTV or the MythBuntu distro. This setup wins, pretty much hands down, compared to others that are available.

XBMC is really great too, but after playing with it I found it's not the best fit for my needs. One of the characteristics I found to not be what I wanted is how slow it is when it is shown a new NFS share. My HTPC box has about 2Tb (i.e. >2000 Gb) of content. The content is mostly my DVD collection ripped to the server so that I can watch what I want, when I want and preserve my DVDs in mint condition - especially the box sets.

After looking around, I found Elisa Media Centre. It works well and works simply. NFS shares don't bother it too much. It has a reasonably low overhead. The user interface is pleasant but is more file oriented than others so it's not a 'new appliance' to learn for non-tech members of your household. Well worth a look. Heck - just install it and try it.

Peace out.

More on TuxGuitar...

It's a few days since the last post about TuxGuitar and it breaking under Ubuntu 9.04.

Somehow, magically, it seems to work for me again.

Timidity is running as a process at boot time, tied to alsa, and is working fine.

I didn't do anything to make it happen, it just happened. It seems to be 'one of those things' that happens around new distro time when something gets patched and something gets broken and then everything seems to be fixed.

Except for bluetooth... but that's another episode.

Peace out...

TuxGuitar and Ubuntu 9.04 Upgrade.

Oops. Another broken application.

I'm an axe-head. OK - I'm learning guitar and use TuxGuitar to listen to guitar tabs in GuitarPro format so that I can play along and get the sound of the tune into my head, not to mention to decide whether I want to learn the piece for acoustic guitar or my beloved fat little Johnson Delta Rose electric.

Anyway, TuxGuitar is borked. Let's unbork it!

* Uninstall tuxguitar and the optional banks, etc with your favourite app manager or be totally uber and do it from the shell.

* Go get :

http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=tuxguitar&filename=tuxguitar-1.1-ubuntu-x86.deb&use_mirror=softlayer

and install it. There will be a warning that it's a later version than in the distro and may not have as much support. For the amount of support the distro is giving this one, who cares? Tuxguitar and the users are the ones making this package so very valuable.

* Try it and see if it works. If not...

* Do 'timidity -iA -Os &' at the command line. Watch what port is reported by timidity.

* Set that port in the Settings - Sound section of tuxguitar. Now it's working isn't it?


Certainly not an elegant solution, but at least it's working for now. I will update you if and when there is a proper fix for this.

Cheers!!

Ubuntu Themes

Ever get the feeling that the standard Ubuntu themes are a bit dull? Me too.

There's no point in me re-inventing the wheel or touring someone else's work as my own (as far too many bloggers do), so just go check this out:

http://www.junauza.com/2009/04/15-beautiful-ubuntu-gdm-themes.html

Cheers!!

Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade breaks printers.

Well, it broke one of mine.

I have the mighty Epson ALCX11NF set up as my network printer. It's a totally awesome small workgroup printer with a capacity of 45000 pages per month. I think I only read that much because I sure as heck don't print that much. It scans, photocopies and faxes too. It's sure a lot of machine for the money.

I still have a little Epson Stylus Photo R210 for when I need to print photographic quality images and one off CD and DVDs, etc. It's working faultlessly after the upgrade.

Getting the printer installed in the first place isn't plug and pray, as Windoze users are accustomed to and Ubuntu users are becoming accustomed to. There is a little tweaking involved because it uses a filter shell script to take output from your application and feed it to the printer. OK - that's an oversimplification, but it will do for the purposes of this article.

First off, here's how to install the printer:
* Go over to http://www.gedda.info/?p=132 and read what has been done before. It's VERY straight forward.
* However, scroll down to Frank's comment on November 6, 2008 and Virgil's comment on November 7. Frank gets it almost right. So does Virgil. The solution of copying the contents of /usr/local/bin to /usr/lib/cups/filters works, but it's not elegant. If you make symbolic links, that would be a far better solution. The choice is up to you.


And here's how to fix the broken install when you upgrade to Jaunty:
* When you try to print, you will get an error and the Printing Troubleshooter will pop up and help you.
* The Printing Troubleshooter tells you that "Missing Printer Driver"... etc... etc... "requires the pstoalcx11.sh program". Bingo!
* First, check that pstoalcx11.sh is in /usr/local/bin and that permissions are set to read and execute for all users and groups. If it's not there, go back to the install procedure above.
* Next, try sudo aa-complain cupsd in case you overwrote the config file during the upgrade. Restart cups (sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart) and try again.
* Drumroll - fanfare - high fives all around - it should be working now.


Come to think of it, this fault is likely to occur on any upgrade where the aa-complain config files are overwritten during an upgrade. Bookmark this page so that you have it to hand when the next Ubuntu distro comes out in only six months.

Undefined video mode at boot.

Here's one choice little problem that remained after a failed partial upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 beta.

After boot, the message "Starting up... Undefined video mode 31f" comes up, with a list of all supported video modes below it. You can press enter and choose the video mode which you would like. In my case, that's 37D.

Here's how to fix it:
Open /boot/grub/menu.lst in your favourite editor (gedit, nano) as su, i.e. sudo gedit...
Search for "vga=". In my case, it was vga=799. I replaced "799" with "893", rebooted and all was well.

In your case, you need to check what the hex number is for the mode you want. Google for a hex to decimal converter and convert that hex code to decimal. 31f = 799, 37d = 893, etc. Change the value at the first "vga=" instance to the value that matches the video mode you want, reboot and all should be well.

Cheers!!

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Upgrade

I did it. You probably did too. Bit the bullet and upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

I've only upgraded my workstation but still have my HTPC and WWW server to go. I'm nervous about those two.

The upgrade is pretty straight forward. Just press "Upgrade" in the software update dialog that raises its head every so often and let the software do its thing. Chances are, if your machine was running in a stable manner before the upgrade, it will be afterwards.

There were two things which bothered me about the upgrade:
1. It removed Google Picasa Beta 3. No big trouble to reinstall it, but as I have more than 100K images on an NFS share the reindex is going to take a long time. The nasty thing about it is that it removed as part of the "Remove Obsolete Packages" component of the upgrade. Watch out for this.

2. The only other headache so far, and this update is only a few hours old now, is that the Tracker Applet keeps reporting "There was an error while performing indexing: Index corrupted". Again, not too bad, as there are a couple of possible fixes for it reported here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tracker/+bug/361560.

The fix I chose was to kill the related processes and delete the indexes, etc and reboot. No problems with the system after that.

The better fix is in the post by Bryan McLellan. Here's how he did it:

"...
Found a workaround/fix that's more user friendly:

sudo apt-get install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r # --hard-reset

Then I logged out and back in so the processes that I had previously killed by hand would restart in a normal fashion.
..."

I came across one more solution that is an extension of the one above. It's a little more elegant and complete in some ways. YMMV, etc. Try this:

sudo apt-get install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r # --hard-reset
/usr/lib/tracker/trackerd &
tracker-applet &
disown -a

I'll be back with more posts on what went right, what went wrong and some other info about this upgrade soon.

Cheers!!

First post...

Hi there...

Despite my name being TechnoMage, I'm more TechnoHippie these days. Certainly no Techno Viking. I'm too much of a lard arse for that.

What's this blog about? Technology. Not bleeding edge, nothing wild. Mostly Linux. Mostly hacks. Mostly ways to get things to work and share the fixes I've found for things that don't work the way you expect or stuff that's broken and more importantly, how to fix it.

I'm tooling around with Ubuntu. I dumped Windows quite some time ago because the license fees for Vista were beyond my means. I found lots of bugs and things that I was generally unhappy with in Vista RCx as well.

There are lots of places on the web to find solutions to Ubuntu and tech issues. Many, many places. A bewildering array of sites. Some are correct, some are half correct and some are just downright wrong. My idea is to try to being these tips, tricks and techniques for the most common problems into one place to make it easy to go from zero to hero quickly and with a minimum of pain.

So far, I run all my businesses solely on Ubuntu. That's not to say that Ubuntu is not without bugs and hassles. It's not an operating system which is perfect. None of them are. However, it's pretty good for general use. As soon as you want to do something different you will need to get your hands dirty in the command line environment. I'll show you what I do as it happens to make Ubuntu a better place to be for most purposes.

Back soon with some meaningful posts.