Latest version of Glibc fixed old Nvidia graphic card reset problem

The most recent upgrade of glibc (version 2.42 according to rpm -qa --last) fixed my issue with the graphics card. I have had problems with my graphics card for ages. It is an archaic Nvidia GeForce 710M, resetting the laptop when starting up the graphical login process or after running for a few minutes. The startup logs say it's some ACPI power management bug and my Lenovo laptop are known for having some ACPI issues on their laptop motherboard. The display manager works fine. It would start, show me the login screen and after entering my password and starting up, it would reset the laptop and I'd be looking at a bootup screen again.

However, it only affects the main (and more bloated) graphical environments, KDE and Gnome. I'd have use a lighter Window Manager, like IceWM. It would start ok and I'd be able to open terminals for work or use the applications as normal. Gemini says it some kernel-related issue and suggested some parameters to pass to the kernel during the Grub stage about ACPI backlight management and disabling Compositing, which it wasn't enabled. 

Right now it works ok and I'm happy. A period like that happened a few months ago and an update broke it again. This was before the big update to Mageia 10. I'm sure it'll come back again and I'm back to Fluxbox. 

Login failures and the joy of Linux

Linux login screen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have only Linux running at home, most of them Mageia. Which means that I am also Technical Support. A few days ago, the kids complained that they couldn't log in on the shared computer near the kitchen..I tried logging in and after I entered my password, a dialog box appeared and said "The name org.gnome.DisplayManager was not provided by any .service files". Clicking on OK would land me back in the login page. Fortunately, I solved it pretty quickly.
I found out that there was a power outage and the machine restarted with a filesystem error. It fixed itself but then the error message came out. I reckon one of the config files got mangled and needed to be re-installed. If you are new to Linux, this is not as bad as it sounds. This isn't the only Linux box in the house, so I had options. My first guess was that the Mate / Gnome config file in my directory was messed up. So I logged in as root. It logged me in without any error.
A quick Google search did said that it was likely my GDM custom.conf file was mangled. I compared it with my laptop's version and it was the same. Then I remembered that Mageia didn't use GDM but LightDM instead. And then I realized that all I had to do was switch Display Managers. Mageia came with about 4, so I was spoilt for choice. I opened up the Mageia Control Center and then chose Boot and then Display Manager. I chose GDM, saved and logged out. Problem solved.
Sorta. I will have to get around to fixing LightDM but there is no rush. GDM is almost similar and Mageia developers went to great pains to ensure all the graphics were consistent. So the difference my kids saw was that instead of a drop-down list with their names to choose from, their names were now in a dialog box list. It was something they saw for about 3 seconds and knew immediately what to do.
This is one of the reasons I love using and working with Linux. It not only gives you choices, those choices are modular to the point where one breaks down, chose another that does the same thing and move on. This would have been a major catastrophe on MSWindows. I'd be looking at a re-installation at least. If I knew, what file was corrupted, I could replace it but I wouldn't know whether it would be of the same version of the other MSWindows components.

Beware: Blogger deletes everything in HTML editing if you don't save

Some words of warning when editing in HTML in Blogger and what you should do every single time to avoid disappointment.
I am livid. I was working on a post for hours when I decided to edit something in HTML view of the editor. I saved the post before switching to HTML view. After some tweaking, I decided to drop the changes and revert. I clicked the Close (post) button and it warned me that all changes will be lost. I was fine with that and said Ok. When I opened the post it was gone. Blogger decided that since I didn't want to save, it should save nothing. Literally nothing. Blogger saved an empty page.
Lost all the work for the past hours. Pressing the back key sometimes switches to the past state but not this time. Blogger was serious. Even though I had saved and closed and opened my post several times, it didn't changed the state of the page. I was working within one page as opposed moving from page to page. I wonder how many people done this and moved to wordpress or tumblr in disgust. Perhaps this is one small way Blogger is killing blogging.
The way to avoid this and have backups before editing a post in HTML is use the preview function. Preview will generate the preview of the page in another tab. Then switch back and edit in HTML. If things go south, you at least have the text in the preview tab.
Thanks Blogger, for nothing. 

Going Minty 3 - Solving why Gimp is opening PDFs on Chromium

Something I did not encounter on Mageia but cropped up in Linux Mint is something quite strange. It's strange because it also seems counter intuitive. Especially for a distribution that does so well in keeping things user-friendly. The odd thing that happened to me in Linux Mint was that Chromium opens PDF with Gimp.

GIMP 2.2.8  graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now this is not too bad if you have a good PC. And it's not wrong either because Gimp can open PDFs and better still, edit them. But you want to open a multi-page PDF, Gimp will render each page up-front. Meaning that if the PDFs has a lot of pages, it's gonna take some time. If your rig has less than 1 GB of RAM, the wait becomes worse.
The solution is obvious: change the default setting or program for opening PDFs. Unfortunately, that didn't work for me. Set what ever it is, the default is set to Gimp. I do get a choice to switch to another program each time, but it tends to get annoying. So how does one change the default application. Apparently there is common program called xdg  that helps with opening of files. Applications under freedesktop.org call on xdg to help them open document files. So for Chromimun, after it downloads a PDF file, it calls on xdg to open it. xdg determines the actual viewer and passes the name of the PDF to the viewer for it to open. The definition for the 'actual viewer' is either set by the underlying environment (KDE, GNOME, etc) or by xdg itself. The command is as follows:

Recover from a bad superblock

When things go really bad, you may not be able to recover a disk. In those times, think of salvaging the data, reformat and live to fight another day. Consider how valuable the data is versus the time spent on repairing something that is damaged and may not be salvagable. testdisk photorec ddrescue are the tools to think of when you come that decision
But I do enjoy a challenge and when a USB disk was brought to me with mounting problems, I just couldn't pass it up. It was an uncommon setup. The USB stick had two partitions, one with an ext3 filesystem and the other with FAT32. I decided to focus on the ext3 filesystem first.

FSCK (Photo credit: SFview)

To cut a long story short, my efforts to mount the disk met with screens full of error messages and cryptic clues as to what went wrong. Running fsck seemed to clean it first but it still would not mount the partition. Running fsck again would yield more and a different set of errors. My previous boss love to used the expression "time to decide: Fish or cut bait". It was one of those times.
This is probably the last ditch effect before you make that fateful decision. This is the line in the sand and the one you have to cross before deciding to put your effort in getting the data out and start all over again.
The recovery process involves rewriting the information about the partition. Specifically, reinitializing the superblock and group descriptors. However, reinitializing does not touch the data part of the partition. It does not touch things like the inodes and the blocks themselves. So by starting out with a 'fresh' set of information that is used to mount the disk, there is a possibility that the data may still be readable. After that, the data part gets checked and hopefully what you end up with is a filesystem that can be mounted properly.
The process can only be done when the partition is not mounted. If you have tried other ways, it most probably isn't. Mine wasn't, obviously.
So here's the process.
1. First, figure out the block size of the USB drive (in this case /dev/sdf1). I need that information to re-build the partition information. Run the command
dumpe2fs /dev/sdaf1 | grep 'block size' -i
Block size:               4096

2. Then format the superblocks. The command below won't format the whole partition, only the superblocks. It is critical that you use the correct block size gathered from the previous step
mke2fs -S -b 4096 -v /dev/sdf1

3. Now that the partition information is 'fresh', I checked the inodes to figure out what else could be wrong with the filesystem. Remember ext3 = ext2+journalling. So, ext2 tools still work
e2fsck -y -f -v -C 0 /dev/sdf1

4. Now that I've done with one element of the ext3 equation, it time to fix the journalling system or more specifically the journal data .
tune2fs -j /dev/sdf1

5. Re-attempt to mount the partition. If everything went well, you should be able to mount the partition and read the data.

After that, for hard disks, you have to determine whether the disk has reached it's threshold limits. Things like SMART properties will help you get that information.

Interested to know more: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1681972&page=5&p=10434656#post10434656

Fix CMOS Battery Issue with NTP: the NetworkManager Edition

While in the previous article, I described a solution to trigger a script when the network goes up. This works on most server Linux setups but it does not work if you are using NetworkManager. NetworkManager has a different way of doing this. If you are not sure whether you are using NetworkManager, consider this: if you are using a wireless network and configuring it using an applet in the task bar or through a GUI program, it's likely that you are using NetworkManager. That and the fact that the script in my previous article didn't work.

NetworkManager applet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

NetworkManager can still do it. It can run scripts after a network interface is connected or disconnected. It's just not apparently forthright about it. But first a little clarification. In Linux parlance, when a network is connected, it is known as "a network being brought up". This is because the network interface state is changed from DOWN to UP.  And vice versa. When talking about network connections, both set of terms are used interchangeably.
NetworkManager offers this feature through a mechanism called a dispatcher. Basically, the dispatcher looks into the /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d directory and run scripts saved in there. Scripts start with a two digit number that determines the order they are run. The scripts are passed two parameters from the main NetworkManager system. They are the network interface that was connected or disconnected and whether it was connected or disconnected.
In my case, I didn't care which network interface it was but it had to be just connected. So the script looked something like this.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Run ntpdate when network interface goes up using NetworkManager
#
export LC_ALL=C
if [ "$2" = "up" ]; then
        /usr/sbin/ntpdate -u pool.ntp.org
        logger Updated time due to network interface going up
fi

Save the file as 10-ntpdate.sh and change it's attributes to be executable. Drop that into the /etc/NetworkManater/dispatcher.d directory. That's it.

Solve CMOS Battery Issues with NTP

Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 netbook Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I guess it was time. My HP Mini 1000 netbook was giving me the wrong time and date every time it booted up. It made going to websites with HTTPS impossible because I was apparently accessing them from the past. Resetting the time didn't work because it would forget the current time and reset back to 2002. I would then manually reset the time using ntpdate.
After a few times, I got tired of this and decided that there is a better way. Since the netbook is connected to the Internet most of the time, I knew that a script could be triggered to run every time the network card started up. All I needed to do was to add the ntpdate command and options to it. Problem was I didn't know what script it was. I wasn't also big on making a custom change that would affect future updates.
I knew the scripts that set the network configuration was in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. My network interface family was eth so the script that set it up was /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-cfg. At the of end of the file was the command

exec /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-post ${CONFIG} ${2}

Reading the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-post file, I found the following command at the end.

if [ -x /sbin/ifup-local ]; then
    /sbin/ifup-local ${DEVICE}
fi

However, the file /sbin/ifup-local does not exist. So I created one with the ntpdate -u pool.ntp.org command in it.  So now, every time the network is configured, the time is correct.
I know it doesn't address the problem of the battery being dead or needing replacement but it'll do for now.

This didn't work for you? Maybe you're using NetworkManager. Run NTPDate automatically with NetworkManager too.

Insert a Table of Contents in a Google Doc with LibreOffice

In another post, I told of my troubles with LibreOffice and Outline Numbering and how it stopped me from setting a table of contents in a file I downloaded from Google Drive.  Finally, I successfully inserted a table of contents into a Google Docs document using LibreOffice with the correct page numbering. It's not hard but somewhat tedious. There are basically 4 things you need to do.

Step 1: Setup the document.

Download the Google Doc document as an LibreOffice/OpenOffice .ODT file. It will likely download it into a temp file. Normally, you can't edit that. So save the file somewhere else to allow for editing. Move the cursor top of the page.

Insert a manual break and change the type to Page Break. Then set the Style to be Default. Now change page number to 1.
Again, move the cursor up to top of document.  Press F11 to bring up the Styles and Formatting window. Select the Page Styles icon from the top row and double click on the First Page style.
Just to check, move the cursors between the top of the document and into the other section and back up and check the name of the section on the status bar at the bottom of the window. The top one should say First Page while the one below it should say Default.
For a better way to do it, scroll down to the comments sections and check out Julian's way of doing Step 2 onward.

Step 2: Correct Outline Numbering styles

Click on Tools - >  Outline Numbering to bring up the Outline Numbering window.
Select Level 1 from the list on the left. In the Paragraph Styles section, choose Heading 1.
Now select Level 2 from the list. Under Paragraph Styles, select Heading 2.
Repeat the process for all levels that have an empty Paragraph Sytle.

A tale of Tables of Contents, Google Docs and the Outline Numbering Monster

I love Google Drive. Specifically, I love Google Docs. It gives me what I always wanted. A word processor on demand, whenever, wherever I need it. As long as I'm near a browser. On a PC connected to the Internet.
Both of which is becoming more common by the day.

To tell the truth, I never really pushed Google Docs. I never really asked too much out of it because I never really needed more than a simple word processor. Have you ever been to a Microsoft Word class where they say that 90% of Microsoft Word users never really use more than 30% of it features. I'm one of those 10% of Microsoft Word users. There is not much I haven't done on Word. Frames. Pictures. Multiple Columns. Sections. Cross-references like footnotes and endnotes. Renumbering pages. Hierarchical documents, where a document is made of many documents that other people are writing. I've even done some marcos and VBA. Did you know that holding SHIFT and selecting text with a mouse will select a square block of text, not lines of text. Did you also know that you could set the background of the editing areas to blue. It was a feature to make WordPrefect users feel at home.
Despite all that, I've never asked a lot from Google Docs. I did ask much perhaps because I was still in awe of the ability to have word processor in a browser. A browser!
That changed recently when I did a proposal for a client. Working with other people in different geographical locations in a single document is what Google Docs was made for. No sending files back and forth. No problems of updating different versions of files. Once the document proposal largely completed, it was time to prepare the document to present to the client. The group had been careful to use the proper headings at the correct level. So all that was left was to generate the table of contents and the cover page. I had resigned to the fact that the cover page was going to be in another document. This was because I couldn't put my head around how reset page numbers in Google Docs. Then, when I went ahead and inserted the table of content, the table of contents didn't have any page numbers.

When in doubt, Webmin

I was listening to the Linux Outlaws podcast. Well catching up more likely. My time has been quite filled up lately and I'm behind on my listening to podcasts. I don't listen to a lot but they are just so deep and the discussion that go on just spring my own opinions and ideas. Some of it, those that are better formed, end up here.

I was listening to the edition that was done right after OggCamp. By all accounts it was brilliant. Well, except apparently there was some problem with food for the volunteers and that there was a mixer with some grannys. It's hilarious and you should listen to it yourself.
But what piqued my attention was Fab's issues with setting up a DHCP server. He had some problems and that although there were loads of Linux people around, most of them couldn't help him. Not that they didn't want to. But it's because they weren't Linux server people. They were Ubuntu users but mainly on the desktop.
Now I'm a server guy. Or so I keep telling myself. But I was wondering what would I do in Fab's situation, given that I have some basic ideas for what to do. Or what would I tell someone in that situation.
Well, there seems to be only one sure thing to do. Install Webmin. The dependency is Perl and no distro worth it's salt does not have packages for Perl. Perl was the PHP of it's day. And for most of the stuff that you want to do with Webmin, the standard perl packages would do. Even then, if you do need them, Webmin is smart enough to suggest to you what to do or ask permission to do it itself.
So if you are ever caught having to so anything server-like on a Linux box (or Solaris box for that matter), just grab Webmin from the distro's repos or the webmin site itself. It supports many languages and has add-on for all sorts of things. But even with the standard Webmin, you could do almost all of the daily admin tasks. I do recommend installing it and gaining some familiarity. Help is uneven with some modules having excellent help while others barely have any. Install it even on a desktop machine, it'll work. There is almost no difference in the basic OS for a desktop and a server.  So give it a try. It's not the first time I've thought webmin is great.

Blogger ate my post, Google Search gave it back

I am a writer at heart. Just look at the number of blogs I contribute to (listed as the Techsplatter network at the bottom of this page). So I prefer Blogger over Word press because it takes care of a lot of details and hassle of running a blog. Don't get me wrong. I've setup Joomla systems and know my way around httpd.conf. But like all racing car drivers and chefs, sometimes you just want drive and cook and not worry about the car or whether the fridge is fully stocked.
Well, I blog everywhere and I used to use Springpad to capture thoughts and snippets that I would include later in my blogs. But then Springpad decided to be more Pinterst-like and that messed up the way I take notes by simply making it harder (it's gotten better since then). It drove me nuts and I sought out and found the Blogger app from Google. I had tried it earlier and it was in a rough shape then. But any other app I tried didn't work all that well.
So I installed it and with the caveat that the post would be typed in html in mind I started using it. I didn't care about formatting because I just wanted to write and have it ready for final editing on Blogger web itself. Well it turns out that the posts can be formatted when you start off. After the first save, it gets wonky and decides to dump you in this mode where you could put in html markup but you really can't see what Blogger will put in. I didn't care because I just wanted to write. And for that, it served me well. I could start a post in the phone and pick up later at home. As you can see in the archive of the blogs, the number of posts have picked up. And because I was out of a job and had tons of free time.
In the end, I thought that I had it licked and was working well within the confines of the app. Then I found out it had one more dark 'feature'.

.com.android.phone Crashing Solved

I explain how I fixed the .com.android.phone crash below. I described the .com.android.phone crash problem and I how I narrowed it down here.

While I didn't have access to another computer, what I did have was another phone, a trusty Nokia feature phone with another carrier (with a good voice plan). I popped the sim out and put it my Android. The Sony worked ok and the error message didn't pop up. The phone didn't have a data plan so I couldn't do anything on the Internet without costing an arm and a leg. To be sure, I set it on GSM mode to nip any temptation. Then I tried the Android sim on the Nokia and it couldn't find a network there too. So the culprit was the sim card or related to it.
By now, one part of me was saying to just go and get it replaced. Enjoy the day in park. I was already getting stares with two phones lying around me in pieces. But I knew I was this close to solving this.
I put the Android sim back into the Sony and booted it up. This time, there was no error message. I checked the Mobile Network list and it found the networks but listed only the 2G/GSM networks. It was enough to get past the McAfee SMS verification.
I now knew what was happening. The .com.android.phone process was trying to connect to a 3G/WCDMA network. In order to do that, it must use APN information from the sim card. The APN list on the sim card was corrupted. It tried to use the corrupted values stored in the APN fields and crashed. Since this is a core Android process, a watchdog process saw it crash and just restarted it again, creating a loop.
I called the carrier's support line from the Nokia and they re-sent the APN list. This was a Command/Configuration Message via SMS / text message and didn't use the data connection. Once the correct APNs were added, the phone connected to the network fine. The other casualty were a few phonebook entries on the sim card for the Nokia. I discovered later that a couple of the most recent entries went missing which probably reinforces my suspicion that there is a bug in the routine that handles read and write to the sim card.

com.android.phone Crashing: The Problem

The solution to .com.android.phone process crashing is here. This post explained what I did to get to the solution.

I was out enjoying a warm day in the park. That, I think, was how the problem started.
Basically, my Xperia Mini Pro suddenly gave the error "com.android.phone stopped unexpectedly". It didn't give me much of a choice but to Force Close it. Then it began looping the error. The only way to make it stop was to go into Airplane Mode. Once set, I couldn't get out of Airplane Mode. I had lost all network connectivity.
Since this was a relatively new phone, I tried remembering what I learnt from the LG Optimus One. And the number one culprit on that phone was resource starvation, specifically memory. I had 50MBs of Internal Memory and I could blame the Linked.In app I installed earlier as the villain.  But clearing cache and data to free up to 100MBs didn't solve the problem.
I tried removing my text messages because on the LG, they too used up memory. It was hard because the pop-up message was kicking me out of the Messaging application. There was a long draft message with random characters, probably made when I put the phone in my pocket without turning on the screen lock. After many tries, I managed to tap fast enough to remove it. I rebooted the phone with the same results.
I was in the park which gave me a significant disadvantage. Since I had no network connection, I couldn't get to a PC to look up the error message. So the next thing I could think of was that it was a malicious act, one of those mobile trojans I keep hearing about. I opened Settings and navigated to Manage Applications, looking for the com.android.phone process. I remembered seeing applications like those on the LG. I couldn't find any. I was getting worried. Maybe a malicious program had come in and deleted the file. That would be the equivalent of deleting command.com in Windows, making a statement that the machine had been 0wned (yes, I am that old). I opened the file manager and tried looking for the com.android.phone file. I couldn't find it which made me think that it was true. Then, I did a sanity check. Android is more akin to Linux than Windows. There is a possibility that .com.android.phone isn't visible to me since the phone wasn't rooted (yet). So I had to think like I would on a Linux box.

Export from Outlook to Thunderbird

An open mind is like an open road,
a journey waiting to happen

Never would I thought the road I take would lead me so far astray. But that is what is good about an open mind. It will lead you many places, often the place you should be. So when I had a problem to export mail from Outlook to Thunderbird, I never expected to use Outlook Express to solve that
A friend asked me to help find a way for her to take her personal e-mails with her. She didn't want nor have a smartphone or tablet. She just didn't want the hassle. Like many true blue users, they learn something and stick with it. Her idea was to find a way to export the message. She even asked me if she could move them to her Hotmail account.
I realized that where she was going, she may not be able to connect to the Internet. But she would still need access to those e-mails, even only if to read them. So my solution was technically complicated but from the user's standpoint, easy-to-use. PortableApps to the rescue!
If you don't know what Portable Apps is, it is a suite of free or open source Windows applications that have been modified to run off a thumb-drive / USB memory stick. The best thing is, you plug it in and click on the taskbar icon to pop-up a menu that acts like the Start button. It will list the programs installed on the USB drive that you can run with just a click. A right-click and you can add more apps from their library of open-source free software. They range from a screen magnifier to the big boys: LibreOffice, Inkscape, Firefox and Gimp. Just select and the PortableApps system will download and install it automatically.
I installed Thunderbird under the Portable Apps menu and made sure it could run ok. Then I exported the folder she needed from Outlook. Problem is, there is no format that Outlook can export to that can be read by Thunderbird. I tried various extensions that neither installed nor were compatible. I finally was ready to import the entire Inbox and then trim out what she didn't need. Which was a problem because she only needed about 25% of the messages in Outlook to take with her.

After reading the various hints and tips online, a common theme emerged. Thunderbird can import Outlook Express just fine but not Outlook. I fired up Outlook Express to see what I could do and was surprised to find out that it could import from Outlook by folders. So I imported the folders I needed from Outlook to Outlook Express. Once finished and satisfied that the messages were there, I closed Outlook Express and started Thunderbird. I then imported Outlook Express (which had all the folders she needed) and they appeared in Thunderbird, on the thumb-drive.
On Linux, you could coax Wine to run Outlook Express and use it as the middle man.
Roundabout way? Yes. Problem solved? You bet. So don't shy away from a solution that is complicated, if you are going to use it only once. Just do it and make the user happy. And sometimes that's all that matters.

Managing Old Dell servers

A few Dell servers I am working with were getting long in the tooth. I was worried about their performance so I decided to monitor them more closely. I didn't have a lot of experience dealing with on-board management with Dell servers, although at first glance, they took a different approach than HP or IBM servers. With HP or IBM, the on-board management system has it's own network interface with a web-based front end or accessible via remote clients. They worked independently of the server OS. Dell's approach was to have a system running on the server's OS accessing the management hardware, even though the management hardware had it's own network interface.

I've always known Dell for their support of IPMI, so decided to take that route first. This great article that explains how to get it up and running quickly. It was command line-based and flexible. However, it wasn't giving me the information I needed easily. IPMI spewed a lot of information but the output needed to be parsed. To decipher the data, it needed to be cleaned-up and restructured. Sorta like SNMP but a tad friendlier.
Then I read on-line about OpenManage which was Dell's own system. OpenManage was both the monitoring hardware on the system and the software suite that used it. It gave administrators information on the servers via a web interface. The servers had the hardware but I wasn't sure about the software.
A quick check revealed that the original CDs were long gone with the boxes after a clean-up some years ago. So I hunted for the files on Dell's support site. The site was helpful in throwing at me all they had but finding the explanaiton for what the files were required a lot of back and forth between web pages that didn't refresh well
In finding out what some of those files were from Google, I found another great article on thegeekstuff.com that was basically a howto to set up OpenManage. But I still needed the correct installation files. I first tried to get all the correct files mentioned in the article from the Dell Support site but couldn't sift through all the gunk. I found the MD5s for the files i needed but not the actual files. I felt more and more like Dell wanted me to download ISOs from their site and find them there.
Finally, I decided to dump the 'correct' way and use the files the article linked to instead. The files the article linked to were on a Dell ftp server but were meant for specific versions of Linux for specific versions of OpenManage. The files the article used didn't match the version of CenOS the server had nor the version of OpenManage that was compatible with it. Regardless, I downloaded a more recent version of OpenManage for the RedHat equivalent version. I reckon if yum/rpm craps out, then i'll just hunt some more. It was a CentOS instead of true-red RHEL but I guess they were close enough.

Recover from a missing kernel : The Solution

This is part two of two parts. You can read about the problem here.
The Solution
The solution was simple. I needed to install a new kernel.
I found that the sysadmin had an iso of the CentOS installation DVD on the VMWare server's datastore. The beauty of most modern distros is that their installation CDs or DVD come with a Repair Mode boot option. I modified the VM's setting to mount the iso as a cdrom for the VM. You may also have to change the VM's BIOS boot options to boot the CD-ROM drive before the hard disk. The VM's settings under Boot has an option to boot straight into the VM's BIOS setting. By default, the wait is too short for you to press the F2 key to enter the BIOS.
So I booted in to installation DVD's repair mode. It was all automatic. That is one of the nice things about using a VM environment: no hardware issues. Your distro supports them on bootup or not (commonly the network interface driver). CentOS found the network interface and configured it, found and mounted volumes and offered advice as to how to chroot to the mounted disks. Which I took. This makes the system think the root directory is the one mounted and not the DVD. Basically it boots into your system from the DVD and then makes the system think that it booted from the hard disk. Other then the running kernel, everything else is going to be loaded from the hard disk. /lib, /usr and /etc were where they should be. If there is no major incompatibility with the kernel, the existing utilities should run fine. I found yum was running ok. Why not? All the rpm databases and config files were right where it expected them to be. I installed latest kernel with yum. No problems because the network card was detected and was up. Once installed, I shut down the VM, removed the ISO from the CD-ROM settings and restarted a-okay.

Wide Pictures and Bad Packages: A Hugin tale

I love my Kodak Z1012. Specifically I love it's in-camera panorama picture auto-stitching feature. I've tried some of the newer cameras' click and sweep panorama picture feature and I am not impressed. The quality is a bit off, like it was a video grab instead of a static picture. Nothing as good as the quality in the picture below which is built from three snaps.

Interesting cloud formation in an afternoon sky

It happened that I was out on a trip and my significant other asked me to stop so that she could take in a nice panoramic view. The road was narrow and downhill, so I stayed in the car while she stood out and took a deep breath. And a few snaps, none of which used the panorama feature. When we got home I realized what had happened and decided this was the opportunity to try out Hugin, a photo stitcher that was featured in Linux Format. There was even a tutorial the for it in the following issue. It is useful as both a straight forward stitcher to create panoramic picture or to create some truly interesting photos. Besides, it had to be good because it was good enough to raise patent violation concerns.
So I started by installing Hugin. Except that the Mandriva Software Manager, powered by urpmi and rpm, said that it couldn't figure out where to get a particular library file. Not the first time this has happened to me, I just copied the name of the file and fed it to rpm.pbone.net, THE place for RPMS. It gave me the name of the Mandriva package and a link where I could download it. I was tempted to click on the file and have Software Manager install it. But I also know that when I do that, it does not check for dependencies. So that would open a whole can of worms.
So I found the same package in Software Manager and installed it that way. I tried installing Hugin again but this time it flat out refused. It didn't complain about the missing library. It just said that it can't install. I was getting annoyed but quickly realized that there was a way. The old-fashioned way.
Rpm.pbone.net has a feature that can check for missing files that are required by a package. It does require enabling Javascript. What it does is that it just looks for them on your hard disk. If it can't find it on your disk, rpm.pbone.net will provide a link to the package that offers the file. Nice.
So I settled on the following process.

1. Select a file that rpm.pbone.net says hugin needs but I don't have.
2. Click on the filename to search for that package that has it 
3. Find the package in Software Manager and install it. 
4. Re-run the check for missing required files
5. Go to 1. if there are any missing files.

I like to work according to a process. Sure, I could bulldoze thru and install hugin from the console and fix each errors that pops up. Or worse still, build from source. Been there done, done that. But running through a process like the above gives my head enough space to look at my work for flaws and deal with them. It also gives me a way to backtrack in case I do something wrong. 

Well, I did found something strange. Some of the files the package requires are provided by the package itself. That is, if I click on that missing file, it would say that I need hugin installed for hugin to install. Talk about circular reasoning. It seems that whoever packaged Hugin for Mandriva, got their RPM pre-packaging info files wrong. Another tell-tale sign that the packager messed up is that the Hugin package also requires /bin/sh. Seen that before on other bad packages. Smelled like a bad cut and paste job.
After installing all the of the files rpm.pbone.net found through SoftwareManager, I downloaded hugin from rpm.pbone.net and installed it (Software Manager/urpmi auto adding --no-deps).
It worked like a charm. Hugin, that is. I'm still fiddling with it to come out with a good picture. It works like a charm but has a KDE-esque number of configuration options.
Now where is that tutorial?

Printing to file lets CUPS print from Flash

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Update 16 March 2014: This no longer happens to me when using Mageia 4. But having the option to print to file is always nice to have.

Once great thing about Linux is that it's components work good together. Even when they don't, you can always use how they work together to get what you want, at least in some part.

My toddler was asking for a coloring picture for Elmo, the Sesame Street muppet. The official site at www.sesamestreet.org didn't have a picture so I went to the Sesame Street section on the PBS site at kids.pbs.org. Both of them were basically Flash programs. Not pages with Flash elements but a page with probably one big Flash element. There were linked to other pages with the same structure. I think this is sort of a workaround to getting Shockwave-like experience without actually using the memory drain that Shockwave is on Windows. There is no Shockwave for Linux for whatever reason.

Anyway, so I found what I was looking for and clicked on the Flash control to print the picture. A CUPS pop-up came up. Now here is another interesting component. Acquired by Apple, CUPS was the elixir that solved so many problems with printing over lpr for inkjet and non-Postscript, non-PCL printers. I credit CUPS and HPLIP to ending any printer setup and printing issues on Linux, essentially taking the drama away. Really smart on HP's part. By keeping old HP printers printing, means more ink cartridges being sold. And Linux guys keep thing running for a long time. 

The thing about CUPS is that it prefers to work in the background. It lets the user facing part be handled by the OS. So when I clicked on the icon to print the picture, Mandriva popped up a different print dialog than I would normally get. This dialog did not offer the "print to file" option. I wasn't concerned initially because I wanted to print to my inkjet. But after clicking on the inkjet and Print, the printer did not print out Elmo. I suspected that there was a problem between the hand-off between Flash and CUPS/Mandriva. I looked at the print queue and there was large job just waiting.
My go-to strategy for jobs being stuck, which is usually a driver problem, is to use the print to file option. This would create a postscript output in a text file which I would convert to PDF. I would then print it again on a another PC in the house or somewhere else. Since postscript is a printer language and PDF is based on  postscript, all of the kinks related to printing would have been worked out and the printer driver would just focus on printing an image basically.
But the dialog didn't offer me the print to file option. I looked on the Internet and discovered that there was a separate Print to File printer definition, called CUPS-PDF. It still used the postscript printer driver on the back-. It just deposited the resulting file on the Desktop. I installed the driver from urpmi and printed Elmo again. I checked on the Desktop and the file was there. Or what I thought it was. True enough, it was Elmo in a postscript format. I converted it to PDF and printed it in no time. Total fault to solution time: 10 minutes.
Upon further inspection, the file on the Desktop wasn't really finished. But it was enough for me to create the PDF and get what I want. It seems that the code in Flash to print the picture passed enough info to the printer driver to print the first page. But it didn't send the code to say that the document was done. It assumed that the printer driver would just take the end-of-page marker and send it off to the printer. But CUPS being a good print system dutifully waited for the end-of-document marker in vain.
So not all things in Linux work well together. But even when they don't, Linux stuff offers other ways of getting what you want. And that is all I need.

Vista Flash Odyssey

I still maintain a Vista partition on my PC for my kids stuff or the stuff that they bring back from school to run. These would be educational CDs and stuff. Also it says in my support contract that I have to have Vista there to enjoy their 3 years on-site support (which I have BTW, 2 motherboards replaced FOC). But we use Linux 99% of the time. I figure that if I expose them now, their perception of computers would not be limited to the Microsoft World.
But recognizing the possibility of needing to use Vista for whatever reason, I maintain the partition and I maintain Vista. This means periodically log in an update windows, flash, java, openoffice and the cone / VLC media player. What prompted me this time was that I wanted to move from openoffice to libreoffice. My other Windows PCs have them already so it was more of leveling the playing field, making sure I have similar programs on all of the PCs in the house. It has been a while since I used Vista. So much so I was also installing chrome this time around.
Sometimes I wonder whether I am denying my children access to their educational software by defaulting to Mandriva. There is this great math tutorial program and a interactive language learning kit. If they ask for it, I'll boot up Vista and set things up for them. But they don't mind and I seem to be getting better mileage from Flash demos and YouTube tutorial videos on the Internet anyway.
During the update eveything went well except for updating Flash on IE. I went to the Adobe website and clicked on the button to down load the lastest version of Flash. It downloaded the Adobe downloader, installed it and executed it. It then threw up an error window said the it was unable to get the correct parameters. I figured that the downloader was facing problems with the Internet link. Checked that and it was ok. So I followed the troubleshooting link from Adobe download page.
Basically, it recommended that I stop every single program I can think of that runs flash and then run the uninstaller for Flash. Well, that's great. Even Adobe has little faith in my ability to figure out by looking in the taskbar which apps is using Adobe Flash and locking the flash files. Why? Because it recommended that if it didn't work, try again because I probably missed a program. I humored Adobe for a while and uninstalling and reinstalling the downloader didn't work.
So off to the Internet we go. I found a highly rated advices which advised me to download a file from the Windows Resource Toolkit and a command file for the toolkit to use. That removed or fixes flash related stuff. What is rich is that the command file is from Adobe. So I tried that and yet the dreaded "unable to obtain correct parameter" error came out.
This was getting ridiculous but reminded me of how lucky I am using Linux. Even with flash and it's installation instruction which divert you to the command line, that routine has worked ok for years (don't get me started on the simlar java installation). I realised that my problem wasn't with installing flash, it was the downloader. It was acting as tthe gatekeeper to getting flash. In reality it was nothing but a billboard. So after looking around I found a link to get the installers directly.
The bruhaha in recent years about flash and Apple's refusal to use it (not for technical reasons, I'm sure) seemed to me like case against progression. Not supporting flash is a deal breaker with all sorts of sites using flash to get past the home page. But with Apple's clout and the popularity of ipads amongst senior management, a lot of sites have had to provide flash-free alternatives. After this episode, good riddance to flash and let's move on to HTML5.

Letting go of old programs

As you may know I am a Mandriva user. More hardcore than I thought, I discovered today.
I am lucky because I have padawan now. Eager to learn but patient enough not to bug me all day long.
So the need was to log onto the desktop from remote. Not just access but use the desktop. Mandriva has this tool called rfbdrake. It provide a one stop interface for remote access, going to and setting up. Basically it calls on rdesktop to connect to Windows boxes, VNC for Linux boxes and uses rfb to share out the current desktop.  Not to be confused with the brilliant remote access tool on SuSe which spawns vncserver to provide remote desktop access from the point of login. This is much more pedestrian. Just share what I am seeing. Problem is, I couldn't find it on urpmi  or on the Software Installer. Now I had procrastinated over some time on fixing a problem that workstation which prevented some updates from being completed. Since both of my problem could be rpm related, I finally set aside some time to do it. The update problem was simple enough. Apparently, the Fortigate firewall triggered some false positives on the files that was being downloaded. So amending the rules slightly to allow the updates to pass thru did the trick. But in the process earlier, the various repositories were also messed up. So removed them all and redownloaded a new set. For good measure, I plunked in plf too.
But after all the updates, I still couldn't get rfbdrake. Time to hunt RPMs on the net then. But horrors, rpm.pbone.net was down. RPMFind was no good either. I had given up on it to find Mandriva RPMs a long time ago. So a hunting on google we go. I finally found it on (of all places) SUNET. Nostalgia engulfed me as I remember the old days of going through SUNET looking for free/shareware software. Then followed the ensuing dependency hell. I was missing rfb itself. Hunt as I may, I could only find one from 2008. Security-wise not good.
Then it dawned to me. I was asking the wrong question. Why was I hung up on rfbdrake? The question would be, what would give me desktop access? If rfb is gone, what are their replacements? I should have learned that I should let go of old programs. The new guys were Vino and krfb. Turns out they worked fine. I miss the unified interface but if it is for the better, why not.

P/S - I am still haunted by my failure to keep a copy of a DOS IVR program (that fit on a floppy!) that ran together with a voice modem (a 33.6kbp with voice capabilites). I am that old. *sigh*