instead of sleeping...

A not-untypical view of my messy desk.

For reasons we're not gonna go into here, I installed a new router yesterday , and when I went to bed, everything was working fine. When I got up in the middle of the night to check something, the wired-network desktop computer couldn't get to the internet.

Oh, damn. What's wrong with the router?

Reboot the router. Problem persists.

Reboot the wired-in computer. Problem persists.

OK, all the devices connected by wifi are fine. Take another computer, disable the wifi, connect it via cable: works fine. So it's probably not the router.

Go back to the wired-in computer. Internet still doesn't work, so let's see if we can communicate with the router over the web-based interface.

That comes in fine. So the computer can see the router, it just can't see through the router to get to the internet.

That means that the network card in the computer is probably OK. Just because it's an easy fix, I try swapping out some cables. Problem persists. (Yeah, that probably wasn't gonna work anyway...)

Hook up the computer directly to the modem, leaving out the router. Computer still can't get to the internet, but it CAN communicate with the modem over the modem's web interface.

All right, now you're just tryin' to piss me off. You're doin' a pretty good job of it, too.

I've got a utility on the wired computer that makes a snapshot of the system files every week (it's called TimeShift), so you can roll back to a time when stuff was all working. So I go back to my last saved snapshot and install that. (Hrmph. The reset only took about two or three minutes; not as long as I'd feared.)

Reboot the computer: everything's working. Reinstall the updates that had come in during the past week (Drat! Three browsers; it's a LOTTA megabytes that we gotta get); everything's still working. Reboot after the updates; still working.

What a pain. Just a coincidence (probably) that it happened at the same time as the new router... and the detective work saved me sending the router back, getting a replacement, and having the same problem.(Although before I did that, I probably would have replaced the older router, seen that the problem persisted, and continued detective work... but I can't guarantee that, either.)

I feel both smart (for having fixed the problem) and dumb (for having planned to send back the faultless router.

Oh, well. Bike ride in a few hours. That'll help.

bad computer juju

It's been a season of bad computer juju.

It reaches back at least as far as a couple of weeks before Christmas, when The Excellent Wife (TEW)'s Prius wouldn't start, then wouldn't show icons on the dash, then wouldn't shut down. She wound up buying a plug-in Prius, with, if not ALL the bells and whistles, then at least enough to start a good-sized carnival.

Then, Optimum raised our rates for internet and phone by 40% and would not listen to reason; they only offered a lower price after we'd already set up the other service. No thanks; we'll go back when Verizon screws us again (as I'm sure they will; don't get me started on Verizon).

This morning, her eight-plus-year-old laptop stopped responding to any trackpad or mouse inputs (I suspect some dodginess in the USB interface). The replacement is on order.

In between, the motherboard for my desktop gave up the ghost. There had been a weirdness for years; I'd gotten messages that some of the USB ports weren't responding, but I could get around that by using other ports. But then the hard drive controller gave up, too. I kept it limping along long enough to do a final backup, and went shopping for parts.

I built this computer from parts in 2009; I'd done a few upgrades in the meantime, but I know it was old. I built it, though, on the understanding that I'd be able to swap out parts and keep it going. So I did.

Now, there have been some changes since I built my last computer. Time was when you could tell if a motherboard had graphics built in by looking at the ports: if there were video ports, no separate video was necessary (this blog is about the most demanding thing I do on the computer). In the intervening time, however, AMD has built some video processing into their main chips. So I needed to get a board/chip combination that did the video, and I didn't know that until I'd bought some parts. I got the board, the memory, and a wrong chip from Newegg, and then was lucky to find a proper chip for $20 on Ebay (didn't need the heat sink; I had that).

The last of the parts came today. I'd downloaded a fresh copy of Linux Mint to install after the build, and I was ready to go.

Case empty, ready for install.

...and a table full of parts to go in.

The hole where the motherboard panel shows in the back of the case.

...and the panel installed.

Motherboard in. The one it replaced was twice that size, and the case could hold the old full-size one.

That silvery rectangle at center is the chip that makes all the difference. Not much to look at, is it?

The chip, though, gets covered by a heat sink and fan. It looks all industrial-punky, but its whole purpose is to take excess heat from the chip. Under the fan are heat-dispersion fans, and copper tubing. The utility of the copper tubing is beyond me, but it looks cool; it's a shame it's gonna get closed up in that case.

Memory: the two blue strips to the right of the fan. Memory now comes all suited-up-and-bowtied, but I liked it better when it was just modules on circuit board.

I keep three hard drives and a DVD drive in there. The computer likes to boot from drive 1, so I only hooked up that drive and attached the peripherals to see if it would turn on.

Not only did it turn on, but the copy of Linux Mint that was already on the hard drive booted up; I didn't need to do a new install. I've gone and re-attached the other drives, and closed up everything, and found the couple of weirdnesses that always go with a new computer (and I'm sure there will be more). But I wrote this blog post on that computer. It's going fine.

(AND it's got a real keyboard. Having to type everything on that benighted membrane on the laptop has been a painful penance.)

So Reg's car is going great, and this computer is working again. Here's hoping Reg's new laptop is a success (and here's hoping my laptop lives long enough that I can save some money before I have to replace it).

revivifying the computer

A couple months ago, I went on a rant about keyboards. One of my good ones is attached to what Laura OLPH called the "Ultra Geeky Linux Computer".

I should have recognized the signs that the boot hard drive was dying (hard drives always do), but I didn't until the computer wouldn't boot anymore. I'd been backing up onto a second (and, in fact, a third) hard drive in that computer, but I hadn't in at least several days. So there was data that I would lose.

Most of my important stuff is in my Dropbox folder, so I knew I wouldn't lose that. There was a possibility of losing some emails I'd rather keep, but that wasn't a real problem (because most of my email accounts use the IMAP protocol, they'd sync up as soon as I logged in again anyway). The key thing was podcasts (I listen to 'em when I exercise), and there were two of them in particular.

The first is This American Life. You can get the .mp3 file of the weekly story for free IF you download it within the week; otherwise it's a 99¢ download at iTunes. I'm incredibly cheap about that kind of thing, and I HATE giving money to Apple, so I download them weekly (I have gigabytes of TAL stories on my backup drives). I hadn't backed up the last couple to the backup drives.

The other was Car Talk. When you sign up for the podcast, they only give you the last two. But I had them for years, and I was still listening to Car Talk episodes from 2013 or 2014. I wanted to get my old list back. I had been using Opera browser as my podcast feed, and I'd been saving my Opera profile through many updates. Could I get the files back?

So here's what I did:

1. Buy the new hard drive.
2. Download the latest Linux Mint live DVD image, burn it to disk, make sure it will boot up. It did.
   
   
   
3. Try to see files on the old boot drive. Hooray! I can see the files! (So the problem must have been in the boot sector.) But because of the Linux copy permissions, I can't copy-and-paste them in the live CD session.
4. OK. Disconnect all the hard drives (the DOA boot drive and the two backups), connect the new drive, install Linux Mint. 
5. Sound doesn't work. Sound doesn't work? Research indicates it's a stupid choice of setting in alsamixer, which I don't initially understand, but I got it working.
6. Hook up the DOA old boot drive. Yay! I can see it! AND I now have the permissions to do the copy-and-paste, which I do. I managed to salvage the "This American Life" files.
7. Check the email program. Yay! Everything's there!
8. Download Opera (not available through the Linux Mint repositories [their version of the "Google Play Store"], but it is available in the right format for Linux Mint). But wait. There's language on the site about how Opera now can do RSS, which is what I use for podcasts. I've been using it for years for that. What?
9. Install and open Opera. Weep with disappointment. Opera has changed their format; they no longer open the old profiles. I've lost all my feeds.
10. Take out the DOA drive, hook back in the other backup drives, and begin the hours-long process of tweaking the system to my liking (I'm still not done).

So I've got a couple of other podcast solutions going now (one is using the Firefox bookmark system, which works better for my purposes if I don't use the built-in Live Bookmark feature), and I've sworn off Car Talk. I'm more of a Judge John Hodgman kind of guy these days, anyway.

Edit Feb 22: A superficial bit of internet research unearthed the fact that the original Car Talk guys retired in 2012 (and Tom Magliozzi died in 2014); they had a number of shows "in the can", but recent shows are just amalgamations of calls and bits from their active period. So it's time to move on from Car Talk anyway.

ubuntu on the netbook, & another cold ride

For all my raving about Fedora Linux (see here & here), it's been less-than-ideal on the netbook; the Atheros wifi card has been locking up, and there have been other minor problems. Now that I can get a decent copy of an install file, I decided to try Ubuntu 11.10 on the netbook again. So in the midst of an insomniac night, I got a new copy, verified the md5sum, and installed it on the netbook, did all the updates and installs... and lo and behold, it's running nicely and the wifi card doesn't lock up (at least so far). And it turns out the controversial Unity Interface is written on top of a partially crippled Gnome, so a number of my tricks and tweaks are working. (E.g., I like the old interface where you could keep files on your desktop; newer programmers evidently like a cleaner look - or maybe newer devices don't support that - in any case, it's disable by defaults, and you have to jump through a number of hoops to turn it on again, but I was able to do it in both Fedora and Ubuntu.)

I feel like SuperHacker.

Short ride today, colder and windier than I would have thought. We started with five, and wound up with two: Ken decided to break off a bit over halfway, and Tom (the leader) and his sidekick Herb went to go investigate an accident site with an overturned car. Dave H and I made it the rest of the way back to Etra Park by ourselves. I've been thinking the desertions were a Hill Slugs thing, but now I'm beginning to think that I'm the omen... I'll be looking for a ride I do where all the same people finish that started.

update on fedora 15 update

Fedora 15 came out on May 24, so I downloaded the DVD file, verified it, and burned the DVD to install it. I tried three times to do the installation, and the DVD faulted each time. So my system was unrecoverable.

I don't install new without doing a backup of all the important stuff, so I went back to my Fedora 14 install CD, and reinstalled that, then did the upgrades, then used the "pre-upgrade" procedure to update to Fedora 15. I lost all my settings, of course, and had to go and install all the software that's not included on the CD (and the "preupgrade" procedure to update is not intuitive; I had to interrupt the boot process to get a menu that allowed me to actually do the update). After that, I had to:

• figure out how to get the printer going again (my Winprinter requires both hplip and hpijs);
  
• figure out how to set my keyboard shortcuts and "compose key" in Gnome 3 (which is much-maligned, but some of that is probably because it's so new, although some is because taken-for-granted functionality - like screensavers - are not available);
  
• figure out how to get the non-free stuff working, like DVD's and .MP3's (hint: it helps to read the instructions when you get a GPG-key error);
  
• figure out where my backups were stored. They weren't where I thought!
  

(Sigh.) Well, it's all working now, and I found the backups, and I'm changing the backup system so I won't make the same mistakes. What this probably means is that I'll make newer, better mistakes for the next upgrade.

time for a new hat

It's either almost silly to post this after that previous post about how much fun Linux is... or else it's an example of the whole point.

My Ubuntu installation from last fall had gotten a bit dodgy: some of the programs were slow, there was a certain amount of cruft that I'd allowed to develop by doing upgrades instead of clean installs for the last couple-three versions, and so on. About ten days before the new version was to come out yesterday, my software-updater-and-installer jammed. I posted a bug, and got little response (I'm sure all the guru staff were workin' their little tushies off gettin' the new version together), so I decided to go with a new install of the Ubuntu 11.4 version, code-names "Natty Narwhal.

It was a failure on my system:

• The new Unity interface simply didn't work for me: it was slow and unresponsive, and the "upper left of the window icons" where you're supposed to be able to click to get the menu items only worked in the two programs I did NOT get from the Ubuntu repositories: Google Chrome and Opera.
  
• I use Gnucash to keep track of my finances, and the windows would not refresh correctly. Sometimes the numbers would not appear at all.
  
• Video, whether Flash, DVD, or other format, was choppy and unreliable. Sound and video were poorly synchronized.
  
• The OS was slow to load...
  
• ... and when it DID load, my monitor would not respond during the boot process (I got the monitor's message that it was not getting signal from the computer), although when the splash screen started, that appeared so I could log in.

Disappointing, although I got it to work well enough to do my daily finances, and back up my documents. I decided this would not do, and after a quick web search, I decided to try the Fedora Project OS today.

My first Linux experience was with Red Hat, probably seven or eight years ago, before they split off Red hat Enterprise from the Fedora Project free-software OS. I liked it then, but when I decided to go with a HP laptop (the dreaded Pavilion, with all the heat problems - my wife and I each had one, and they both died at about the same time; I'm still angry that HP knew about the problem and did nothing; see the post on my other blog). So, in a sense, I was going back where I started.

I'm writing this at 7:00 pm. I had gotten the ,iso file early this morning and burned it, so I started installing the system at about 3:00 pm (today was an early day at work). Here it is, about four hours later, and, after taking time out to grill and cook dinner and wash dishes, I'm doing useful(?) work on the computer; Flash, Java, .MP3's, and Video all run (there's an "official/unofficial" page to teach you how), my Winprinter is going (no small feat in itself; much of the software to run this kind of printer is bundled with Windows; they should not even come out of the box under Linux), my favorite software is all installed, and I didn't even lose too many of my emails between one install and the other.

This install was a pleasure. With the Ubuntu disks, it took me an average of three tries to get one that was correct: this Fedora disk was correct on the first try. It booted right up on my system. There are many similarities between Ubuntu and Fedora, and many of the differences are minor (such as the way the user obtains permissions to adjust system properties: if you can sudo, you can learn su... and apt-get and yum are so similar, that the hardest part is learning the minuscule differences between them),

For my purposes, I think Ubuntu is trying to do too much. I'm running 2 GB of RAM and a dual-core Athlon processor; with my NVidia GeForce video, there should be plenty of power here (and with Fedora, there is: no boot-screen problems, smooth video playback...). And I'm not an OS groupie: I don't spend a lot of time looking at my screen backdrop - I'm most interested in what the computer will do. I just want an OS that will do the stuff I want. (Well, that's not really true; I also want an OS I can play with, tweak, and get in and out of trouble with - but I don't really give a hoot abut the eye candy).

(As I was writing this post, I went back to see my reactions to my install a year ago - and I had had problems with that, as well.)

Fedora. It's fittin' me.

midnight computer worries

My main computer has never run Windows; I built it from parts to run Ubuntu, and it's been happily doing that since spring of 2008. Linux computers rarely get any kind of attack (I don't use any virus protection), but I stumbled on two articles on rootkits in Linux this morning (it's heading for 4:00 am, and I've been up since about 2:30). I don't do my best thinking at this time of day (that doesn't happen for another two hours or so), so I got panicky and downloaded what appear to be the most common rootkit utilities for Ubuntu: chkrootkit and rkhunter.

They didn't show up in the program menu anywhere I could find, which means they run from the ooh-scary command-line terminal (my first computer didn't have Windows - back in the DOS 3.3 days - and even my second computer only had Windows 2.something, that was basically a menu for command-line commands, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with the command line - but you've gotta know what the commands are to use 'em; graphical interfaces, with all their problems, are better for the person who doesn't know what the program will do). Both programs want to be run as root, and rkhunter wants a parameter set. For the basics, use these commands:

sudo rkhunter -c

sudo chkrootkit

That'll get 'em going... and now I've got a place where I can go look these up when I need 'em!

(A year and a half ago, on another blog, I wrote about the use of the command line. I'm sticking with the thoughts expressed in that earlier post.)

$39 Laptop?

India has come up with a 1500 rupee ($39) touchscreen laptop - a computing prototype it aims to make available to students from elementary schools to universities.

It runs Linux, and...

is equipped with an internet browser, video-conferencing capability and a media player, among other facilities.

What a great idea. I would definitely get one if they were for sale here.