Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell » dapper

Most exciting upgrade to Ubuntu/Edgy

Marc Nozell — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 11:03:58 +0000

This morning I had a free hour and this is how I upgraded my hp compaq nc6000 laptop from Ubuntu/Dapper to Ubuntu/Edgy. After updating /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the edgy repos…

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -dy dist-upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Well there was a conflict between x11-common and xinit which both wanted to provide the man page XSession.5.gz.

11:45am Wendy calls me and says the school just called and Griffin is in a ambulance on the way to the hospital and to meet her there. He accidentally ate something that contained pineapple — to which he has a severe allergic reactions to.

11:49 I’m on the road approaching the hospital and get a call on my cell phone. The woman says she is the school nurse and starts saying my son is having an allergic reaction. I interrupt her and say ‘Yes, I just talked to my wife and I’ll meet the ambulance at the hospital’. She says ‘Well, your son is sitting here with me in my office.’ Then we realize she is the school nurse from a different chool and is talking about Trevor who is having an allergic reaction! Trevor had his bee/wasp allergy shot earlier this morning and is reacting to that. Since he too was having difficulty breathing, he too is sent via ambulance to the ER.

12:05 — Wendy and I both arrive at the ER before either of the kids do. Explain to the ER admitting person that yes both boys are ours, they are coming from different schools, with the same problem (allergic reaction, breathing difficulty), but different reasons (food allergy vs reaction to allergy desensitizing injection).

Long story short, after evaluation, some benedril and alburterol breathing treatments, we were sent home.

Around 3pm I worked through a few iterations of apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade, apt-get -f install, aptitude dist-upgrade, I have a fully upgraded from Ubuntu/Dapper to Ubuntu/Edgy.

There are a bunch of new, interesting packages to take a look out. The list is here: EdgyConfiguration

Now that was a stressful upgrade.

Logitech USB headset & Ubuntu/Linux

Marc Nozell — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:11:28 +0000

My wife had an unused Logitech Stereo USB Headset 250 kicking around the house that I took into the office today. Joy of joys! Ubuntu/Dapper recognized it and both the headset *and* microphone work out of the box.

Just like Microsoft Windows ;-)

Democracyplayer on Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 01:32:08 +0000

The good folks at GetDemocracyNow.com provide debian packages for Ubuntu/Dapper, but didn’t get the dependencies quite right. After intalling the two democracyplayer packages from their Ubuntu download page, I needed to also install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install libboost-python1.33.1 libgtk-mozembed-ruby mozilla-psm

There is a ton of great content!

Moving photos around behind f-spot’s back

Marc Nozell — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 01:44:45 +0000

I’ve been using f-spot since it showed up in Ubuntu/Breezy and have been keeping all my photos in a directory structure like this:
/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.30/ /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.07.01/
But sometimes I’ve forgotten to unclick the “Copy file to the Photos folder” box in the photos import dialog and end up with photos under ~/Photos/. Recently I checked and found there were almost a gigabytes worth of photos under there.

So this is what I did to move them to under /PHOTOS/Photos/ and keep all the tags and metadata correct.

Back up /home and /PHOTOS to an external USB. I love rsnapshot.
$ rsnapshot daily
make an extra backup of the f-spot database
$ cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db photos-backup.db
Start poking around the f-spot database and updating it.
$ sqlite3 ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db sqlite> .schema photos CREATE TABLE photos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, time INTEGER NOT NULL, directory_path STRING NOT NULL, name STRING NOT NULL, description TEXT NOT NULL, default_version_id INTEGER NOT NULL );
See how many photos are in ~/Photos…
sqlite> select count(*) from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%'; 260
Take a look at a few of them to see the path names…
sqlite> select directory_path from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%' limit 0,10;
Update the pathname to my prefered one. I’ve added an ‘a’ to the end just so I won’t overwrite an existing directory.
sqlite> update photos set directory_path = "/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a" where directory_path = "/home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22"; sqlite> .quit
Make the directory and move the files to the new location…
mkdir /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a mv -v /home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22/HPIM117* /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a

Repeat for each directory. I did it all within emacs’ shell so cut-n-paste made it a snap.

Another list of Ubuntu essentials

Marc Nozell — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:53:01 +0000

Mark Pilgrim has compiled his list of Ubuntu essentials — time to add some KDE goodness to ‘My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration‘ page…

My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration

Marc Nozell — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:13:14 +0000

I’ve posted some extensive notes on all the post-installation configuration steps needed to make an Ubuntu/Dapper standard install the way I like it — dual head, personal & corporate email, network manager, f-spot, etc

Check it out: My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration

Creative Webcam Live! works with Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:00:28 +0000

I just picked up a Creative Webcam Live! which does a reasonable 1024×768 snapshot and 640×480 video resolution for $49. At first it looked like I’d have to build the spca5xx kernel module for Ubuntu/Dapper, but it is now included in the default kernel & modules packages.

Just plug it in and start using one of the many video capture packages like camorama, webcam, camstream, motion, gqcam, etc and start playing around!

FWIW here below the fold are my loaded kernel modules:

Module Size Used by spca5xx 653808 0 videodev 10144 1 spca5xx binfmt_misc 13064 1 rfcomm 43604 0 l2cap 28192 5 rfcomm af_packet 24520 4 ppdev 9668 0 fglrx 391756 8 ipv6 286912 44 speedstep_centrino 8752 1 cpufreq_powersave 1920 0 cpufreq_stats 6688 0 cpufreq_userspace 6496 1 cpufreq_ondemand 7752 0 cpufreq_conservative 9000 0 freq_table 4928 2 speedstep_centrino,cpufreq_stats tc1100_wmi 6884 0 video 16324 0 acpi_sbs 20172 0 battery 9988 1 acpi_sbs i2c_acpi_ec 5120 1 acpi_sbs i2c_core 22848 1 i2c_acpi_ec container 4608 0 button 6704 0 pcc_acpi 12416 0 sony_acpi 5580 0 ac 5220 1 acpi_sbs dev_acpi 11236 0 hotkey 11492 0 ext3 148104 3 jbd 65876 1 ext3 md_mod 76052 0 dm_mod 63256 1 lp 12356 0 ide_cd 35780 0 cdrom 41408 1 ide_cd sd_mod 20448 0 scsi_mod 145960 1 sd_mod snd_intel8x0 35740 1 snd_ac97_codec 99808 1 snd_intel8x0 snd_ac97_bus 2400 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm_oss 56448 0 snd_mixer_oss 20544 1 snd_pcm_oss hci_usb 18004 2 pcmcia 41948 0 tsdev 8032 0 joydev 10432 0 bluetooth 54084 7 rfcomm,l2cap,hci_usb snd_pcm 96676 3 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss pcspkr 2244 0 tpm_infineon 8724 0 snd_timer 26884 1 snd_pcm tpm 11232 1 tpm_infineon parport_pc 37988 1 parport 39400 3 ppdev,lp,parport_pc floppy 64676 0 yenta_socket 30124 3 rsrc_nonstatic 14624 1 yenta_socket ath_pci 81820 0 ath_rate_sample 17224 1 ath_pci pcmcia_core 45272 3 pcmcia,yenta_socket,rsrc_nonstatic wlan 146684 3 ath_pci,ath_rate_sample ath_hal 148848 3 ath_pci,ath_rate_sample tg3 113284 0 snd 60004 8 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer soundcore 10784 1 snd snd_page_alloc 11304 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm psmouse 40036 0 serio_raw 7748 0 intel_agp 24700 1 agpgart 36784 2 fglrx,intel_agp shpchp 49504 0 pci_hotplug 30788 1 shpchp evdev 10176 1 reiserfs 284016 3 ide_generic 1504 0 ehci_hcd 33800 0 uhci_hcd 35408 0 usbcore 137700 5 spca5xx,hci_usb,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd ide_disk 19200 9 piix 11652 1 generic 5124 0 thermal 13768 0 processor 26344 2 speedstep_centrino,thermal fan 4836 0 fbcon 43904 0 tileblit 2784 1 fbcon font 8320 1 fbcon bitblit 6464 1 fbcon softcursor 2304 1 bitblit capability 4968 0 commoncap 7328 1 capability