I received a new monitor for xmas and wanted to set up dual display (twinview) for Ubuntu 9.10. I already had the proprietary Nvidia drivers install, and it was very easy to get the dual monitors up and running. However, I always got this error when trying to save the configuration: Can't parse /etc/X11/xorg.conf. And upon restarting, only one screen would show and I would have to set it up again.

Even when I launched Nvidia with sudo (sudo nvidia-settings), I still got this error on the command line:

VALIDATION ERROR: Data incomplete in file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Undefined Device "(null)" referenced by Screen "Default Screen".

I moved /etc/X11/xorg.conf to a new filename, ran sudo nvidia-settings and was able to save as new xorg.conf file and now I have both monitors on start up. Also looks like you can simply edit the existing xorg.conf file and you will be able to save your settings.

It seems like every time I upgrade Kubuntu, my sound doesn't work anymore. I guess "doesn't work" isn't the right term. It seems that the output is muted. If I type pavucontrol into the command line and then go to output devices on the volume control window that pops up, the Internal Audio Analog Stereo is muted. I don't know why the pulse audio volume control is defaulting to that setting every time I upgrade, but I fiddled around with my sound settings a couple of years ago when I was having issues and that's likely the culprit. I think I need to do a fresh install one of these days....

I have decided to play around with NetBeans 6.5. I used NetBeans 4 years ago for a little Java programming while getting my Master's degree and since they recently added PHP support and have a thriving development community, thought it would be a good time to give it a try again. IFirst, I need to get Java 6, so I used Add/Remove..., selected Show All Available Options and searched for Sun Java, and installed it.

Next, I downloaded the PHP only version of NetBeans 6.5, issued "chmod +x ./netbeans-6.5-ml-php-linux.sh" to make the file executable, and then issued "bash ./netbeans-6.5-ml-php-linux.sh" to begin the installation (of course I could have right clicked on the file, selected properties and changed the permissions that way...). The installation screen popped up and sat there blank. Oh boy... I issued "java -version" and it came back with 1.5.0_11, instead of 1.6.0_10. In the far reaches of my brain, I remembered installing Sun Java before it was available in the repos, and manually overriding Ubuntu to use that. So I had to make sure I was using the latest version, and issued "sudo update-alternatives --config java" :

I swtiched to the newer version, and was able to install NetBeans 6.5. Looking forward to testing it out!

I recently purchased a video camera that I can mount on the side of my ski goggles and decided to have a go at video editing with Linux. I used a USB cord to plug the cam into my computer and manually grabbed the .avi files off the mounted drive. I installed Cinelerra and played around with that, however it kept crashing when opening the .avi files. I had a couple .dv files from a friends video camera, and those didn't cause it to crash (although the program does crash pretty frequently regardless of the files you are working with).

Hoping another program would have better luck, I installed both Open Video Editor and Kdenlive, both of which were unable to handle the .avi files. Open Video Editor didn't crash, however when trimming the clips, the audio became out of sync with the video. On Kdenlive, it simply crashed every single time I opened an .avi and the debug info seemed to indicate a resampling problem of the audio. However once I rebooted, I was able to add .avi clips to my workspace, but the sound was completely messed up and it crashed when trying to maniuplate the .avi. The audio problem on Open Video Editor, plus the debug information from Kdenlive leads me to believe there may be a problem with my installation of ffmpeg and the .avi that are coming off my camera. The .dv files work fine in all the editors.

Kdenlive seems to be my favorite so far, although I haven't used any of the programs much. Cinelerra's work flow and user interface are less than spetacular, and Open Video Editor seems fine for very simple edits, however was very difficult to trim a clip to a specific point. It looks like Kdenlive will be in the next Ubuntu realease, so I am using Windows Movie Maker, which I have on Vista in the meantime. It is actaully a very nice program to work with, and I produced my first video in about 20 minutes from the .avi files (my only other experience with video edting was using iMovie on my friend's Mac once).

Fingers crossed the new release of Ubuntu will have Kdenlive working on my machine...

In addition to the problems I have had with KDE after my upgrade to 8.10, I also lost my sound. I have been trolling the Internet trying to find a solution and finally got it fixed after a couple days of frustration. I followed the instructions here for PulseAudio, and now everything seems to be working fine - well, at least I am able to get sound out of my speakers while listening to a CD and from Flash Movies on websites. Haven't tried an input device yet...

I updated to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and while the new interface for KDE looks great, I am having major problems. Need to get some work done, so I haven't had a chance to try and figure out what the issues are. I am writing this while using Gnome... Here is a nice screenshot of my desktop after about 10 minutes of use. I updated my Nvidia driver, but that doesn't seem to help. Things seems to be working fine in Gnome, although GIMP is acting a little strange.

I have had the Garmin GPSmap 60CSx for awhile and have always used the Garmin software on my windows box to get my waypoints off the Garmin handset and onto my computer. Truth be told, I barely use my GPS, but that is starting to change. To use it more, means I need to be able to get my waypoints onto my Linux box. Searching around, I found GPSBabel, and it works like a charm. Installing with apt-get was easy as always:

sudo apt-get install gpsbabel

Per instruction on this page, I used the following command to grab the waypoints and drop on my computer. Just make sure to use sudo, or you may get errors. Looks like an interesting program with lots of features. Looking forward to using it more.

sudo gpsbabel -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F waypoints.gpx

I need to work with editing some images programatically and have always favored ImageMagick over GD (to be fair, I haven't used GD in at least 3 years). In the past, I used php to pipe commands to the command line via exec(), which never felt right. I remember seeing some development work on an extension on planet-php.com, and after some searching landed on the Imagick extension for PHP. I tried to install is via sudo pecl install imagick , but ran into errors when I tried to find MagickWand-config, which I think is basically the API for PHP to ImageMagick. Reading the comments on php.net, and I was able to install it. Apparently I was missing libmagick9-dev. I didn't need to add the imagemagick.so, as the ini file was already in /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d.

Now I just have to familiarize myself with the class (And it is a class, not just some functions :)).One of the authors of the extension, Mikko, has some great tutorials on his blog. Just need to get some free time to read and play with it. But this is much better than building a huge command to execute via exec()!

I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu Server to the latest LTS and it wouldn't boot anymore. Did I mention that it was a software RAID 1, and probably not the most intelligent decision on my part since I had to manually set up the RAID 1. I had all the data backed up and decided to do a fresh install, since I had made a mess of the system over the last couple of years and this would be a good chance to re-install and get everything set up the way I wanted. Following this post and this post, I installed Ubuntu but ran into numerous errors when trying to re-partition and delete multidisks that existed from the previous install. I was headed nowhere fast with an unusable system...

I found this forum thread, re-booted and ran some commands. They seemed to work for the most part, however I got errors on the --zero-superblock. I tried the install again, and low and behold, the multidisks were gone and I was able to re-partition and create new multidisks. I am going through the install right now and hopefully wont run into any additional errors. Then its on to getting Apache, PHP, SVN, MySQL all set up. Need to decide if I want to compile PHP rather than install from apt-get...

I am building a new database driven website for fun and decided to check on teh status of Workbench and see if they had a Linux version. As luck would have it, they launched a Linux version a couple of days ago! I downloaded the binary for Ubuntu from MySQL and tried to run it, but it spewed out errors. Searching around some more, I found an article on MySQL that talking about building from source on Ubuntu, and copied and pasted the apt-get install for all the dependencies.

I opened a terminal, cd'ed to the bin directory and issued "./mysql-workbench" and voila, the program opened. After creating a new diagram and trying to edit a table, I got a segfault. Looks like I'll have to build it. Following the aforementioned article, I issued "sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev", and found that I already had that library installed, so I followed the directions and installed Google's ctemplate library. Then I downloaded source, complied to tried to install and ran into errors - most of which had to do with Cairo. Upon closer inspection, I realized I didn't Cairo build with support for glitz, just used the version available with Ubuntu. Ahhh, the joys of Linux. Back to the drawing board, where I was able to install Cairo with Glitz enabled, then compile Workbench from source. Quickly had a chance to play around with it and it is no longer segfaulting when I edit a table, but not sure how stable it is until I get more time.

To recap, here is what I did to get it working:

1. sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool libzip-dev libxml2-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libglade2-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libmysqlclient15-dev uuid-dev liblua5.1-dev libglitz-dev libglitz-glx-dev libpixman-1-dev libpcre3-dev g++ libgnome2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libpango1.0-dev


2. sudo apt-get source cairo


3. Extract the cairo tarball and cd into the folder


4. ./configure -enable-glitz


5. make


6. make install


7. Download the source for workbench and extract it, and cd into the folder


8. ./autogen.sh


9. make


10. make install DESTDIR=/home/rlbolton/apps/mysql-workbench (obviously choose a destination dir appropriate for you)

I am actually amazed I got everything to work, considering my very limited knowledge of Linux. Now we'll see how stable the app is... And thanks to MySQL for making a Linux version!

Ever since I upgraded to Gutsy Gibson (7.10), Open Office has been having problems. It would open fine, but everyime I tried to access the menu, the screen would redraw and the menu would disappear. It wasn't a huge deal, as I could shortcut most things, such as saving, undoing, bolding and closing the window. The deal breaker though, was the fact that I was unable to toggle between OpenOffice and other windows. This was causing problems as I like to take copious notes as I learn things about Linux. Being a relative noob, I had lots of notes to take recently while setting up SVN with Zend Studio for Eclipse, and getting rsync to push Subversion exports out to my prod server.

I finally resorted to using google docs to keep my notes, which I may keep doing. Finally I stumbled upon a posting that detailed how to fix the problem. Sounds like Compiz and legacy settings are the cause. Here's what to do:

• Setting -> Advanced Desktop Effects


• Scroll down to very near the bottom, and click on Workarounds (the icon is a bandaid :))


• Uncheck Legacy Full Screen Support

Presto, no more problems with Open Office redrawing itself every time I try to access the menu!

In March, I wrote about Firefox's woeful performance with some javascript heavy sites. I am happy to say, Firefox is performing much better on these sites now that I have upgraded to Gutsy Gibson and Firefox was upgraded. This contrasts with the fact that Firefox seems to be crashing a lot more on windows these days, especially Vista.

I already had Eclipse installed, so I decided to install all the dependencies and then install PDT. Ben Ramsey has put together a nice list of urls. After getting all the deps installed through Eclipse, I installed PDT and started a new project. I quickly ran into some problems – the PHP Explorer was not working and sometimes the auto complete would fail to work.

I'm not sure what was causing the problems (I have Sun's Java installed, as I know other versions of the Java VM can cause problems), but I un-installed Eclipse through apt-get and downloaded the PDT all-in-one package. I unzipped the file, fired up Eclipse, and it worked fine.

Next on my list was Subclipse. Installing it was a breeze. It took a little while to figure out how to use it, but I was able to connect to the repository on my dev server and checkout a project in a short amount of time. After making a token change, I attempted to commit the changed file back to the repo, That's where the fun started. I kept getting various error messages about “Option Expected” in the svnserve.conf. I changed the svnserve.conf numerous times to no avail. After almost an hour, I finally figured out the problem. I was uncommenting the lines in svnserve.conf and NOT removing the extra whitespace before the declaration. I finally removed the whitespace and viola, it worked...

It can't be so, yet it appears to be, at least on my box running Ubuntu Edgy Eft... In trying to use Google Docs, Firefox repeatedly freezes and or takes forever to respond when using spreadsheets online. This could be a problem with the JS on Google Docs, but it runs fine on Firefox and IE on Windows. I have also experienced this problem on other sites that make use of Javascript. On a site that I developed which uses Thickbox, Friefox on Linux takes its sweet time bringing up the images, but runs smoothly for FF on Wndows. I experienced the same problem on this site with a different Linux box that was running Fedora Core 4, so its not just this distro or version of Firefox. There is mention over at O'Reilly about FF crashing on Linux, but that isn't the problem I am having. It's simply a matter of Firefox taking forever for certain sites with JavaScript.

I received my new Dell desktop and server on Wednesday, and spent the last couple of days installing Ubuntu on them. For my server, I have two 250 gig hard drives, and wanted to set up RAID 1. I can’t say I know a lot about RAID controllers, but from what I have read a lot of the supposed RAID controllers that ship with servers are not real hardware controllers and therefore do not always work out of the box with Linux.

For that reason, and cost, I decided to go with software RAID 1. Following the directions, it worked like a charm. I had to download the alternate install in order get the options to set up RAID, and I decided to go with 6.06 server edition. Everything was up and running in a short amount of time. Using this site as a guide, I began installing the software I needed, like Apache, MySQL and PHP5. I ran into an interesting issue on my desktop, while trying to install Ubuntu 6.10 along with Windows Vista, but I’ll save that for another post….

I am enjoying KDE and Kubuntu - the ability to customize anything and everything is kind of fun. I admit, it is almost excessive, but it is nice. I took me awhile to figure out how to add a show desktop icon to my KDE toolbar, as there are so many different options and ways to customize the Kicker. Turns out, all I needed to do was:

• right click the the toolbar


• Choose "Add Applet to Panel"


• Scroll through the list of icons until you find Show Desktop

Next on my list of things to do to waste time, is to browse through all the content on KDE-Look and find something to spice up my desktop...

I am bought a couple of Linux distros to install on my desktop. I currently have Fedora Core 4 on it, and use it a decent amount for development. But I have never been completely satisfied with it, mostly due to lack of time to fine-tune it and lack of experience with Linux. I decided to do a fresh install and try out both Fedora Core 6 or Ubuntu Edgy Eft. I played around with Ubunutu using the live CD to get a feel for it, and was amazed that everyting just worked - browsing the web, playing a CD, etc…

I decided I would partition my hard drive and install both, but ran into problems. I had to pick one distro to try first, so I went with Fedora because I was familiar with it. After installing Fedora, I ran into some problems with it recognizing my Ethernet card, something that had happened before with Fedora 4. While I was able to resolve the problem before, I knew it would work out of the box with Ubuntu, so I shut down and installed Ubuntu. I have not used Ubuntu much, but I am impressed with how it just works. I decided to install KDE (I guess turning it into Kubuntu?), and used synaptic to search for "kubuntu-desktop"

Ten minutes later I was logging in with KDE. Next, I needed to install PHP5 and Apache2. Going from
this webpage, I used apt-get for Apache and PHP5 and had a working version. The real test came when I viewed a webpage with the compile info of PHP5. On Fedora Core 4, I was forced to compile PHP5, as the default install lacked a lot of things I needed, like SOAP. PHP5 with Ubuntu has SOAP thankfully, no worrying about compiling PHP again. To be fair, I haven't tested Fedora Core 6, but my initial impression is that Ubuntu is just a lot easier to use for someone with limited Linux skills like myself. I am looking forward to playing around with it some more!