Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

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

This is a follow on to last week’s post about Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I’ve been using the xorg.conf-ati.20060621 configuration at work with two monitors, but when at home the laptop didn’t degrade down to working with the one LCD monitor of the laptop. So, here is a new configuration that lets you switch between a single monitor mode (1024×768) or one large one (2048×768) that can be ’slid over to’ by using the mouse. The key press is Control-Alt-+ (the + over on the side where the number entry is). On the laptop, it is Control-Alt-blue_Fn-?

Here the is xorg.conf file:

xorg.conf-ati-works-with-one-monitor.20060624

I’ve noticed a number of people asking about dual head support in dapper on #ubuntu, so here is my setup:

This hp/compaq nc6000 laptop/notebook that has an ATI card:


$ sudo lspci|grep VGA
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]


I have two head monitors working with both the ‘ati’ and the closed source ‘fglrx’ drivers.

Here are the configuration files:

Before you start hacking around with your xorg.conf, save a copy somewhere safe.

I usually run debian/sarge on my laptop, but tonight it is booted to Ubuntu ‘Hoary Hedgehog’ and wanted iPodder running in this environment too.

The current ‘released’ version of iPodder today is v2.0rc3 for Linux.

First off, go grab and install the the kit from http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/

You’ll need to use python2.3 instead of the default python which is v2.4. I already had it installed, but you many need to install it. Also the older version of the xmms python library needed to be installed, but the current version of libwxgtk2.5.3-python is needed.

The commands to install those packages is:

sudo apt-get install python2.3 python2.3-xmms libwxgtk2.5.3-python

Finally the PYTHONPATH needs to be extended to pick up the wx 2.5.3 libraries.

Either edit /usr/bin/iPodder to look like this, or just do it manually when you want to run iPodder:

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
cd /opt/iPodder
python2.3 iPodderGui.py

Enjoy!

This moring I accidentially double clicked on the straw RSS aggregator icon and two copies raced
to see who could corrupt the app’s database first.

straw refused to start with this error:

ItemStore.py:52:__init__: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run
database recovery - - PANIC: Invalid argument
Recovery Error: See README for details on how to recover data.

And the straw README says to do this:

$ db_recover -h $HOME/.straw -c -v
$ db_checkpoint -1 -v

Fair enough, but I don’t have those scripts installed db\_recover or db\_checkpoint. It turns out that they are in the libdb2-util package. (apt-get install libdb2-util)

Fortunately the recovery processed work fine.

Lately, I’ve been using the bleeding edge version of iPodder from CVS (which confusingly is in the
iSpider directory) Here is how you can grab a copy for yourself:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder login
CVS password: (press return)

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder co iSpider

[tons of informational messages about downloading iSpider]

$ cd iSpider
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ python iPodderGui.pyw

… And fire up your favorite dev tools!

I’ve been using the ipodder beta on
my laptop that runs GNU/Linux Debian/Sarge in the command line only mode. But over the holidays there was and update to wxpython that gets the GUI working.

This is what you need to do:

$ alien –to-deb ipodder-1.1.2-1cl.noarch.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i ipodder_1.1.2-2_all.deb
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ /opt/iPodder/iPodderGui.py

and enjoy…

I listened to Dave Winer’s Coffee Notes for 24-Oct-2004 podcast on the way home tonight and felt compelled to reply to him with an audio reply email about Richard Scoble/Scooble’s voice mail. Here is how I created it.

* Get the Festival Speech Synthesis package for your Debian GNU/Linux box


$ sudo apt-get install festival

[...bunch of status about installing a festival and dependancies removed...]
$


* Create a snappy reply. I like emacs. This is exactly what hi-dave.txt looks like:

Hi Dave!

This is Marc No-zell and I just listened to your Coffee Talk with
Richard Scoble. It sounds like Microsoft’s voice mail system is using
a descendant of the DECK-talk system that was created by DECK in the
1980s.

I’m creating this audio reply using the Festival Speech Synthesis
System on my Deb-ian GNU Linux laptop. Neener, neener, neener!

Well, thanks for the Coffee Notes!

Now I did do a little cheating here. Festival follows strict pronunciation rules and sometimes gets words wrong. For example my surname would be said as ‘nozzel’, so I spell it how I want it to sound. The same is true for DECtalk and DEC, which sounds like ‘dec-tork’ and ‘december’ (trying to be a little too clever ;-)

* Convert from text to wave format:


$ text2wave hi-dave.txt -o hi-dave.wav


* Convert from wav to mp3 format


$ lame hi-dave.wav hi-dave.mp3


* Listen to the result:


$ xmms hi-dave.mp3


In addition to a work-provided nc6000, I also have personal Compaq Armada M700 and gave ubuntu 4.10 a install this evening.

Absolutely no problem installing or having X properly configured! One nice touch is the installer found the Orinoco wireless PCMCIA card and configured it so the network was available immediately on boot.

Here are my notes on install ubuntu 1.0 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop.

Used warty-install-release-i386.iso downloaded on 21-Oct-2004. (md5sum a491903a2d2197651864dec3836d85e0)

The laptop has currently installed WinXP (hda1), Debian/Sarge (hda7) and now ubuntu (hda6).

Booted the laptop while in the docking bay and started install. Complained that it couldn’t find a NIC, I told it to continue and not to use a static IP address.

The nc6000 has:

* Pentium M (should do power management, but stock debian kernels don’t seem to include it), 1G memory, 60g internal drive, 30G or CD/RW in multibay
* embedded intel wireless — works with ndiswrapper
* bluetooth — don’t have any other bluetooth devices, haven’t tried
* IR — haven’t tried, but should try to get going with my palmpilot
* Broadcom nic — works
* SD bay — works under WinXP, but appears to be impossible under Linux

The docking bay pretty much just has a USB breakout, passthrough nic and power. There are 2 multibays which usually have a CD/RW and/or an extra disk.

At the point it asked about installing GRUB in the master boot record, I skipped that and continued
on with the installation. I prefer to let debian/sarge manage grub.

After the ubuntu installer finished, I booted into debian/sarge and added the following to
it’s menu.lst file:

title Ubuntu 1.0
root (hd0, 5)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro
initrd /initrd
savedefault
boot

Then rebooted to Ubuntu…

After about 40 minutes it started poking around and found that kacpid was sucking up 95% of the cpu. I did

renice 19 -p 5 (which was the pid of kacpid)

and the install proceeded much faster.

The X displayed looked nice along with the drum sounds.

But the Broadcom or tg3 driver wasn’t loaded. Using ’sudo network-admin’ fixed that.

Still looking around.

[still installing — watch here for more info]