Category Archives: Linux

Lenovo Laptop?

I’m thinking of getting a new laptop either the Lenova ThinkPad T400 (which is a replacement for the T61), or the IdeaPad U330 to replace my aging Dell 700m

The big thing for me is do they work with Linux (for me specifically Debian or Ubuntu).

For anyone interested in either laptop, looks like the the U330 works (near) flawlessly with Ubuntu. See this posting on this thread for an enthusiastic comment:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5741753&postcount=5

And with the T400 you’ll have some work to get everything working smoothy. Such as the dual-graphics cards which is how Lenovo get’s up to 10 hours of battery life from the T400.

However, if you don’t mind using breaking stuff, the new Beta version of Ubuntu appears to work reasonably well on the T400. See this blog posting and this thead on Lenova’s forums for more details.

I’m torn between either, the small size of the U330, versus the better battery life of the T400 (and the fact that both are a weeeeee bit dear).

OK, I’m tired as I write this, and I find sometimes when I “blog while tired” that my grammar/spelling/ability to make sense suffers, so maybe I’ll rewrite this in the morning. 🙂

Key missing?

If you get this error message:

W: GPG error: http://people.debian.org unstable Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 212253A4F641D1A6
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

This is because you don’t have the public key for Randall’s Nvidia Debian packages! The following instructions are from

http://wiki.chrismoonlight.de/doku.php?id=wissen:computer:linux:gpgupdateerror

gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –recv-keys F641D1A6

gpg –armor –export F641D1A6 | sudo apt-key add –

sudo apt-get -u update

However I would have thought that installing either the debian-maintainers package or the debian-keyring would have the required key as the description of each packages says it’s has the keyos of the Debian maintainers:

debian-maintainers – GPG keys of Debian maintainers

debian-keyring – GnuPG (and obsolete PGP) keys of Debian Developers

Interview with Rasterman of Enlightenment Fame

An interview with Rasterman on OSnews, founder of Enlightenment, on E17:

http://www.osnews.com/story/19679

When will E17 be released?

… does Rasterman have any timeframe in mind for the release of the final version of E17? His reply was to be expected – “No comment.” Smiley face included. The big blocker right now is a lack of time, Rasterman said.

So feel free to chip in! 🙂

E17 on Debian

Quickie install instructions:

Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

# repo from Falko Schmidt:

deb http://debian.alphagemini.org/ unstable main

This will also require you to have Debian’s unstable branch listed in your sources.list .

If your have Enlightenment DR16 installed or any other versions of E17 installed you’ll need to uninstall them:

sudo aptitude remove –purge enlightenment-data enlightenment e17 emodule* libevas* libefreet*

Install Falko’s E17 build:

sudo aptitude install -t unstable e17-desktop e17-extras e17 eutils emodules0-all enlightenment

And this should install E17! Logout and select Enlightenment from the session list of your login manager. I’ll update this post with more details later in the week or at the weekend.


Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/

This article originally posted at:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/24/e17-on-debian/

Update on Enlightenment E17 for Debian

Update: I’ve decided to use Falko’s packages, see my posting here:
http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/24/e17-on-debian/

If you want to run E17 on Debian you have 4 choices (as of April 2008):

Wait for E17 packages to make it into Debian’s experimental repository:
http://sicherheitsschwankung.de/post/jan/2008-03-31/going-debconf-08

The Debian E17 team are in the process of loading packages into Debian experimental branch and they should be available in the near (or not so near) future.

Use the AlphafeMini repository for Debian Sid/Unstable, created by Falko Schmidt. See http://xsm.alphagemini.org/E17/repository/ for more details.

Maybe use Elive’s repositories to install E17 as Elive is based on Debian, but this may cause other problems as Elive might be based on a older version of Debian (anyone know?).

Compile your own see http://www1.get-e.org/EFL_User_Guide/English/_pages/2.2.html for more details. But, you will have to uninstall these if you ever want to install a pre-packaged version, plus you’ll have to manually update packages yourself.


Interestingly, Falko Schmidt is also a member of the team working on the E17 packages that are going into experimental, so using Falko’s packages might be the safest and easiest approach to get E17 on Debian. However, when packages are available in experimental (and eventually in Sid), you may need to purge Falko’s packages and install the Debian experimental ones.

I’m going to e-mail Falko to see if he has an opinion on this.

Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/

This article originally posted at:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/17/update-on-enlightenment-e17-for-debian/

e17 on Ubuntu Revisited

Ever since my original post on installing Enlightenment E17 on Debian and Ubuntu things have changed, such as the server that hosted the package repositories for both Debian & Ubuntu going off-line (supposedly temporarily but it’s been offline for almost 6 months).

Also, I’ve been having issues with E17 working correctly on my laptop running Ubuntu. This is probably because of conflicts between old and new packages, and because E17 is still beta code.

In this posting I’ll concentrate on installing or reinstalling E17 on Ubuntu 8.04 otherwise know as Hardy Heron. You should be able to use the same instructions to install E17 on other recent versions of Ubuntu. I’ll also try and the same for installing E17 on Debian at some point in the future.

First, remove all existing traces of any previous E17 installs.

sudo apt-get remove --purge e17 emodule* libevas* libefreet*

You’ll notice that I’ll use a mixture of apt-get and aptitude to remove and install packages. I’ve found that sometimes aptitude is a little too aggressive in removing packages, and sometime will remove package that I need. For instance when I started to remove E17, aptitude also wanted to remove xserver-xorg which would mean X wouldn’t work (no GUI).

Next, remove any old repositories for E17 from you sources.list. But, first make a back-up copy of the file:

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.bak

Then, remove or comment out any other E17 repositories from the file, by editing the file with your favourite text editor. I normally use emacs:

sudo emacs /etc/apt/sources.list

Or if you don’t have X running and are doing this from a console:

sudo emacs -nw /etc/apt/sources.list

You can use # to comment out lines. Remove any references to edevelop.org or soulmachine.net .

Then, add the dunnewinde.net repository, by adding the following lines:

# dunnewind e17 repository for Ubuntu Hardy
deb http://e17.dunnewind.net/ubuntu hardy e17

You can replace hardy with either gutsy or feisty if your running either of those versions of Ubuntu.

Now your ready to install/reinstall Enlightenment E17! 🙂

sudo aptitude install e17

Or if you also want to play with a media player based on E17 libraries install eclair also.

sudo aptitude install e17 eclair


Once the install is completed, logout. At the login screen (GDM) change your session to Enlightenment and login and you should see something that looks like the following:

Sorry that screenshot is missing. I deleted it as someone was leeching the image by linking directly to the image from their blog (using up my bandwidth instead of theirs). I’ll upload a new image in the near future.

No other themes are installed, I’ll write another post in the next few days showing how to get themes from get-e.org and install them. In the meantime here’s a screen-shot using the Darkness theme:

This posting originally at:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/15/e17-on-ubuntu-revisitede17-on-ubuntu-revisited/

Today’s Links

Regularly drinking coffee may help prevent or reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7326839.stm

And binge drinking can affect memory recall (at least in young drinkers):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7328863.stm

Ubuntu Linux to be certifiied on some of Sun’s hardware:

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0236534620080402

A lot of Linux enthusiasts have taken to Ubuntu, and all of its versions are freely available. I think that this can only help them squeeze into the Enterprise space, as it’s helped them gain mindshare.

Red Hat, for example, is separated into their commerical offering, RHEL, which wasn’t cheap the last time I looked at their prices, and the freely available Fedora.

Fedora is free and open source like Ubuntu and is used by Red Hat as a testing ground for new features and technologies, but isn’t exactly the same as the “for fee” versions. I think this could hurt Red Hat in the long term; the enthusiasts helped bring Red Hat to where they are, but if they can’t easily (or cheaply or freely) get the enterprise products they won’t be using them nor introducing them into companies, instead they’ll be using Ubuntu or even Novell which offers a near complete version of their product for free.

And I’m surprised that VMWare’s market value has dropped by $30 billion, yes that’s billion dollars in six months supposedly due to competition that will arise products that Microsoft has in beta:

http://www.marketwatch.com

The market already seems to have voted. VMware’s stock, which debuted at $29 a share in August, soared past the $125 mark by late October. The shares then sharply reversed — no doubt helped by a general downturn in technology stocks — and have since sunk back below the $50 mark. The stock closed at $51 on the day of its IPO.

But, man I wish I’d gotten some of those share at $29 or $30 and sold and 125 bucks! However, work doesn’t allow us to invest in IPO’s. US financial companies have rules in place to prevent conflict of interests, and there are also Federal Laws in effect. However, it’s not like most of us Techies get any knowledge that would help us in the markets anyway, but I guess they pay us fairly well to make up for this.

OK, back to the point, maybe I should really be surprised that VMWare’s stock price increased so much, from $30 to $125 is a 400% increase. With all the other competitors in the market it would only be a matter of time before any market share they would gain, or gained, would be infringed on.

And with free offering, such as Xen on the server side, and Qemu for virtualisation on the Desktop, and a multitude of other competitors on the desktop side, it’d be hard to take and keep market share.

However, the VMWare folk are a smart bunch of lads and I’d expect some innovations from them in the future.

OLPC for Birmingham, Alabama?

I just submitted this to Slashdot, as I think it’s interesting what the end result will be? Will the OLPC get squeezed out? Will US kids like ’em (I think they will).

bettlebrox writes Birmingham, Albama, may be the first US city to purchase the OLPC, per the Boston Herald:

‘The City Council has approved a $3.5 million plan to provide Birmingham schoolchildren with 15,000 computers produced by the nonprofit One Laptop per Child Foundation, which is putting low-cost laptops in the hands of poor children in developing countries. The city School Board still must agree to the deal, and some members have reservations. They want proof that computers designed for the remote African bush or the mountains of South America operate properly in an American city already laced with computer networks.

“Third World countries just don’t have some of the issues that we have to deal with, like liability and networking,” ‘

Other concerns they have include training for teachers and kids, and responsibility if OLPC’s are lost or stolen from a child.

Personally, I think it’s a great idea, they’re easy to use (even for teachers), it’s a great way encourage kids to be more computer (and maybe programming) savvy, and it allows for easy online social networking. Also, kids and families can easily pool wireless connections using the OLPC, and it should work seamlessly with any existing networks.

What can we tell the School Board (if they read Slashdot) to address their concerns? And how soon do you think it’ll be before some major US software company offers them free computers running a different OS instead? Also, is it me or does the attitude of the article seem to imply that as this is for poor foreign children that’s it not good enough for Amerikan kids?”
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/south/view.bg?articleid=1077975&srvc=rss