A Man and his Penguin

I had a really rotten day at work today. I had to say goodbye to all my friends and colleagues at Myer. I was "let go" because I can’t work every Saturday, and because my former manager is a bitch.

Still, one of the new people at Myer is interested in Linux, so I gave him my e-mail address and once he e-mails me I’ll send him some CDs.

When I got home, my 3 Ubuntu 6.06 CDs arrived! I’m wishing I ordered more, as I seem have burnt a lot of copies of my version 5.10 ones recently The best part is, they come with a bunch of stickers! I cannibalised one of them (cut out just the logo) and stuck it onto my computer alongside the Windows, ATI and AMD stickers. Sweet

For those of you who may not know, Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, send out CDs anywhere in the world for free! So if you want to try Ubuntu, you just register on http://shipit.ubuntu.com and they’ll send you a copy for free! You don’t have to pay anything! (sometimes the post office charges you duty, the idiots).

Oh, one more thing. We bought my mother an iPod Shuffle yesterday, because her old 128mg MP3 player wasn’t working properly. We chose the Shuffle because it’s easy for her to use. However, it wasn’t easy for me to get working! I installed the iPod software… or tried to, it crashed. Trying a second time got me further before it crashed. So I restarted, tried again, and it installed successfully, so I had to restart again. I copied all the songs onto the iPod using iTunes, but it wouldn’t play them! In the end, I had to reformat the iPod and use the Linux Gtkpod program to transfer the songs. Now it works fine.

Three cheers for Ubuntu for getting my Mum’s iPod working!

I also got Compiz working on XFCE, so now XFCE users won’t feel left out :-)  I don’t know whether this is practical or not, as XGL, Xorg and Compiz together weigh in at a hefty 80 megs of RAM (and XFCE is primarily for older computers), but I’m sure I won’t be the only one who will use it.

There is no screenshot as proof. XGL seems to interfere with screen capture. How the heck do people take screenshots of the cube though?

Why should Gnome and KDE users have all the fun?

1. Install XGL as per the instructions (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/Xgl), except…
2. When opening up the new .sh file, follow the instructions for your particular
graphics card on either DE. Instead of the last line, put: "exec /usr/local/bin/xfce4-session".
3. Follow the rest of the instructions for getting XGL going.
4. When setting up Compiz (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/InstallingCompiz), follow the instructions for KDE (i.e. writing a script to start Compiz that you must double-click)
5. At the top of the script, after #!/bin/bash, create a new line. Put "killall xfwm4". Then make a new line directly underneath that, with "sleep 2" (just to be sure that Xfwm is closed by the time Compiz tries to start)
6. Log out and start up the new XGL session. Run the script you created. Congratulations, your DE
can now wobble with the best of ‘em!

I know some of you don’t know what XGL and Compiz are, so I’ll explain first.

XGL is a system for Linux where the objects on the desktop are drawn by the computer’s 3D graphics card, rather than the computer’s CPU. This means, in theory, that the CPU has more power available to it. (or does the overhead of running a bigger program negate the saving?)

Compiz is a window manager. A window manager maintains the windows on screen and draws the title bars and things. The reason why Compiz is so good is because it can create amazing special effects on your desktop, as long as you’ve got XGL installed.

Words can’t really explain the effects, so do a search for "Compiz" or "wobbly windows" and you’ll find plenty of pictures and videos and things. Basically, whenever you move a window, it stretches and deforms as you move it. Windows have a drop-shadow, and they become semi-transparent when in the background. When they minimise, they zoom away into the background.

Apart from "wobbly windows", Compiz is famous for drawing the user’s virtual desktops onto the faces of a cube. You can switch from one desktop to another by Control-Alt-dragging. Cool effect.

I tried installing XGL and Compiz back when I first upgraded to Ubuntu 6.06, but it didn’t work. I decided to try again today, and what do you know, the instructions have now changed, and I got it working!

I now have KDE as well, so I set up KDE with Compiz too! Naturally, there are a few bugs. Shutting down XGL/KDE kills the X server. Using the launchers in XGL/Gnome causes visual artifacts. It seems that you can’t run two DEs at the same time when on XGL.

Compiz’s special effects are better than those which will be in Windows Vista. XGL and Compiz are free to use and only require 256 megs of RAM. Vista will be expensive, and the effects in Vista will require 1 gig (plus 128 megs of dedicated graphics card memory)!

I have had two messages telling me that people read my blog. Thanks! I think a number of other people are occasional readers.

I’d just like to talk about WINE, if that’s alright. For those of you who don’t know, WINE is a program for Linux that allows you to run some Windows programs. It’s an open-source implementation of the Windows libraries, and because of the way it’s built, you can get the genuine Windows libraries and put them onto your computer and make the programs run better.

Due to certain things, I’d never read the HOWTO about substituting Windows libraries for the WINE ones, so I’d never had much success. I could run a simple CD-cover-designing program that came with my computer, a motocros game, Firefox for Windows, and the Flash 8 plugin for Firefox.

(LEFT: hi-5.com.au on Linux Firefox, RIGHT: The same site on Windows Firefox on WINE)

So then I found that WINE creates a kind of Windowsy file structure inside the Linux user’s home directory (/home/chris/.wine), and you can put the Windows DLLs there. (/home/chris/.wine/drive_c/Windows/System/)

Now I can run the Windows beta of Songbird on Linux! It’s a bit slow, and sometimes the playback is a bit jaggy, but otherwise it’s okay. It probably works better than the native Linux version at the moment :-)   Although my MP3-player’s software runs, it can’t find the player. I’ve almost had Microsoft Movie Maker running.

My tip is: When you launch a program through WINE in the terminal, if it doesn’t work, see if it mentions any missing DLL files in the terminal output. If it does, find the DLL in your Windows partition and copy it over to WINE’s directories.

Finally. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I’m a fan of the podcast they do over at www.ubuntuos.com. Please support them, they’ve just put out a new one. Oh, and I bought a cheap  Windows game called Ambulance Driver; it’s heaps of fun. Doesn’t work on WINE though, it tries to run but nothing appears on the screen. I bet Cedega would work with it… but that’s another blog post…

A friend of mine has a laptop computer, where Windows got corrupted and wouldn’t start. I decided to recover her data using a Linux Live CD before bringing the computer back to factory condition.

After a brief struggle setting the computer to boot from CD (her housemate had changed the BIOS password to "pigs", lol), I booted Damn Small Linux to begin the process of recovering her data.

But DSL didn’t want to mount my new HDD MP3 player. So I tried Puppy, and that wouldn’t recognise any USB devices for unknown reasons (probably hardware incompatibility with the laptop’s USB card). So I tried Knoppix, and Konqueror kept crashing while I tried to drag the old files to my drive. So I tried doing it from the command line in Knoppix. After a little while, it just stopped copying. (and the K panel also crashed)

So I tried Dynebolic, and the file manager wouldn’t start up! So I tried setting up Samba (networking software) on my computer, and copying the files from the laptop directly to my computer. That worked for a short while, then the laptop crashed.

So I tried Samba again with DSL, and I couldn’t even get it to work.

FINALLY I did what I should’ve done all along. I booted up Ubuntu on the laptop, and successfully copied the files from the Windows hard disk to my MP3 player. Ubuntu was the only distro that actually didn’t crash.

Now, the really silly thing: While I was trying to get Samba working, I changed the hostname of my computer… to nothing. This caused my user account to be denied access to the sudo command… not good! When I tried to boot up Ubuntu under Recovery Mode, I couldn’t start up the control panel that lets you change the hostname of the system. After much frustration and wrangling, including fiddling with the sudoers file and recursively changing the permissions of the entire Linux partition, I discovered where the hostname is stored, and changed it back. (/etc/hostname, for anyone who’s interested).

Thanks to the people who sent me messages and told me that they read my web log. And yes, I did get the laptop going again under the heel of Windows. My friend needs to use MYOB, so unfortunately I couldn’t convert the computer to Ubuntu. Would’ve been good though!