Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

network-manager-working.jpg

Originally uploaded by marcn.
I’ve been running the currently unreleased Ubuntu/Dapper release after having upgraded first from Hoary to Warty before arriving at Dapper.

Somewhere along the way something prevented the cool new NetworkManager from starting up. Whenever I logged it would immedately exit with a useless message about not finding all the needed resources.

Last night at the GNHLUG meeting, Christopher Aillon of Red Hat told me the magic command to fix it:

$ sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor

The lack of some icon cache was preventing a network configuration tool from running. Ugh.

This allowed the applet to start, but wasn’t controlling the network devices. For that, I needed to remove references to any network devices so the only thing in my /etc/network/interfaces are these lines:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

I finally got around to hooking up a second monitor to my Ubuntu/Breezy laptop and convinced xorg.conf to ‘do the right thing’.

The compaq nc6000 notebook has the “ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility 9600/9700 M10/M11 (RV350 NP)” video card
and has a video out at the back.

Here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf with Xinerama (move windows from one screen to another). The aging Compaq monitor sits to the left of the nc6000 laptop.

Here is a copy of my configuration: xorg.conf-dual-head-xinerama

In Ubuntu ‘hoary’ it appears that it isn’t possible to set up a printer separator (sometimes called a burst page or Job Sheet) for a CUPs print queue. The Ubuntu print gui, (System->Administration->Printing) just doesn’t expose that option. Usually it can be set in though the web interface to CUPs (localhost:631), but that is disabled.

To enable a JobSheet, edit the file /etc/cups/printers.conf to look
something like this:


# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.23
# Written by cupsd on Thu Aug 4 11:03:47 2005
<defaultprinter LaserJet-9000>
Info LaserJet-9000
DeviceURI socket://zko03018.americas.cpqcorp.net:9100
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets unclassified none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</defaultprinter>

The unclassified refers to a file in /usr/share/cups/banners/ that is just a chunk of PostScript that gets prepended to the print jobs. If you feel like hacking PostScript, you can create your own burst page.

The stock Ubuntu repositories don’t include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:


apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs


I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

I’ve been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use — Ubuntu. This week I’ve been running Ubuntu ‘Hoary’ and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker from
the headphone controls.

phzi on #ubuntu pointed me to the unofficial UbuntuGuide.org, specifically the section configuresoundproperly. Those instructions were perfect.

I’d upgraded to the latest iPodder (v2.1) on my Ubuntu (’Hoary’) laptop today.

# tar jxvf iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

# cd iPodder-linux

# sudo ./install.sh

(take the defaults)

The only glitch is wx libraries aren’t in the default PYTHONPATH, so set this environment variable either at the command line, or pop it in ~/.bashrc

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH


Now clean up a little bit…


$ cd ../

$ rm -rf iPodder-linux iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2


Now, you are all set to start iPodder!

Getting closer to not needing any special knowledge to get iPodder running on a GNU/Linux distro…

- - - - -

Just for searchers, this is the problem you see if you don’t set the PYTHONPATH:


$ iPodder
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “iPodderGui.py”, line 38, in ?
import iPodderWindows
File “/opt/iPodder/iPodderWindows.py”, line 4, in ?
import listctrl as listmix
File “/opt/iPodder/listctrl.py”, line 296, in ?
EVT_DOPOPUPMENU = wx.PyEventBinder(wxEVT_DOPOPUPMENU, 0)
AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘PyEventBinder’