Tom's Insights - Week of 8/13/01

Week of August 13th, 2001

Last Updated: August 21, 2001 09:56

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Monday August 13, 2001

Greetings and Hallucinations. Hope your Monday was a good one.

We've been.... well... a tad busy. Leah sent the kid to daycare and spent the day compiling an IBM tutorial (plain text to XML). I helped, and edited another tutorial direct from XML. I also spent two hours on the phone, BBQ'd hamburgers for dinner, picked up some incidentals from the grocery story, and updated the Buzz newsletter. A full, yet satisfying, day.

My Linksys hub/router continues to work as advertised (applied an important firmware update yesterday).

I continue to rejoice in my new Dell Inspirion notebook. As a matter of fact, we've revamped Syroid Manor substantially because of it. My workstation, Janus, is now in Leah's office (our bedroom; retrofitted with a clean install of Win2K, the latest/greatest HP 6300 scanner drivers, and my 19" monitor). Thumper -- Leah's old machine -- will be retrofitted as a gaming machine for the kids. Phoenix will likely be going to a friend's to serve as Exchange 2000 Server box. What comes around, goes around. Six months ago I was the one begging and borrowing hardware. Today, I'm proud to say I have spare boxes to lend as appropriate. A nice feeling to be sure.

Me? I have a vast, clean desktop, and I'm using my new notebook as my do-all "desktop replacement". So far, so good. I'm enjoying the experience and the mobility immensely.

Here's a snap from one of the highlights of my year -- meeting Brian and Marcia Bilbrey. Needless to say, we're pretty pleased with ourselves in this picture (off to dinner at Joey Tomatoes):

More tomorrow; hopefully I'll find time to put up a worthy post. Thanks for your time...

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Tuesday August 14, 2001

(Note to Self: You must click Save if you want your page updated... Sorry folks, I fully intended this post to be up last night)

Another fantabulous day in the great Canadian Prairies. The morning dawned bright and clear; not a cloud in the sky for as far as the eye could see. About noon when the temperature was starting to get uncomfortable, a summer storm blew through town, gave the grass a good water, and dropped the thermometer about 10 degrees -- all in the course of about 40 minutes. Perfect.

-oOo-

Speaking of perfect, my new Inspirion continues to impress me -- especially now that I have all the programs I use every day installed and tweaked. This is the first laptop I've used that is truly a desktop replacement. There isn't anything I did on Janus that I can't do just as well on Phaedrus. Not only that, but with just a notebook on my desk, I actually have some elbow room (and more space to pile the paperwork that used to litter my floor <g>).

When I first got Phaedrus, Dell had partitioned the hard drive in one big chunk and thrown everything but the kitchen sink on it. As noted, it was a wonderful Out-of-the-Box experience to have everything installed and correctly configured, but once I had poked around for a while it became clear to me that some "modifications" were in order. So I wiped the drive, partitioned it into two 10 GB chunks, and did a clean Win2K install on the front. I then installed SP2, all the Dell-supplied device drivers (sound, built-in NIC, and video), and then -- bit by bit -- installed the applications and utilities I use every day. This afternoon I finally had few empty moments and decided it was time to see how easy it would be to install Linux on the back of the hard drive.

The first distro I tried was -- of course -- Slackware. Unfortunately, I didn't get too far. I had downloaded the 8.0 ISO the night before and burned it to disk. It booted just fine, allowed me to FDISK the drive and start the installation process, but about half way through it bombed. Bum ISO. Rats. Not surprising, however. Slackware is hosted on SourceForge, and for the last two or three months download speeds have been pathetic, which more often than not, ends up corrupting one or more files.

Next I tried Red Hat 7.1. It installed, found the built-in NIC, found the USB mouse, but none of the supplied video drivers would give me a readable screen under X. Red Hat also overwrote my MBR without asking -- very rude, people, and totally unacceptable.

My final test of the day was SuSE 7.2. It installed without incident, found and configured all devices, plus gave me the option to configure a remote printer. I picked my LaserJet that's hanging off the Linksys RAID server (nice touch). It also saw there was another OS laying claim to the MBR and suggested I make a boot floppy -- which I did. That left my Win2K installation untouched and allows me to get to Linux via floppy. Acceptable for the moment. Whatever nVidia driver SuSE 7.2 ships with works. I can start X, although I don't have the range of resolutions I'd like. I'm sure this could be fixed with a tweak of the XFreeConfig file. Not a issue, however, as I don't plan on keeping SuSE despite the ease with which it installed. That's because (a) I prefer the flexibility of Slackware, and (b) the engineers in Germany decided to replace the proper full screen command line with a graphically framed alternative that has a lizard up in one corner. Geez-Louise, folks. WTF? Sorry, but I spend a lot of time working direct from the command line, and I don't have much use for the option SuSE provides. They do have a damn fine setup routine, especially given the range of new and/or unique devices on my notebook. Far as I can tell, it pegged them all correctly. If I worked solely in X all day long, SuSE 7.2 would probably be a keeper. As it is, I'll wait for a clean ISO of Slackware and try again.

Tonight, I'm taking my wife out to our favorite Sushi restaurant. ALONE! NO KIDS! We're actually going on a date. Danielle and Landon get along famously with our neighbor Jen, so she's coming over to baby-sit. I can't remember the last time Leah and I escaped -- just the two of us. Should be fun.

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Wednesday August 15, 2001

I'm not feeling terribly "chatty" tonight, and my eyes are bleeding on my new notebook's keyboard, so let's do a picture show, shall we?

The first two snaps are from our weekend in Vancouver with Brian and Marcia (Leah just got the film back today):

The "gang" hanging out on the Capilano Canyon suspension bridge.

And "Engineer" Landon at the beach.

Finally, the fine art of summertime barbecue lessons. Yes, I have a wife. She doesn't like her picture taken <g>...

-oOo-

Many thanks to Mike Kelly who sent this link which is a treasure trove of how to install Linux on just about any Dell laptop configuration you'd care to name. Go to the Home page for a complete listing of all notebooks/laptops. Definitely one to bookmark.

That's it. I'm toast. Well, I will be when I finish another chapter in the Exchange Server 2000 Admin book I'm trying to digest...

[Thurs. AM: Sorry about the PNG images I posted last night -- tad on the large side all right; serves me right for posting an update at midnight. I've converted the photos to JPG. And thanks to RBT for setting me straight on how to correctly determine which image format to use for what. Appreciated]

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Thursday August 16, 2001

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Friday August 17, 2001

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Saturday August 18, 2001

My eyes feel like two piss-holes in a snow bank. I've slept maybe eight hours in the last 48. The last time I was this tired and sleep deprived was when I wrote books for a living <g>. What have I been up to? Waging war with a pesky neighbor? Researching a vaccine for the next Great Plague? Hardly. I'm been trying to install Linux on my notebook.

This all started as one of those projects that I estimated would take, say... three hours? Four or five tops. The problem was I kept coming --> <-- this close to success. You've all been there. That wonderfully misplaced notion that in another 10 minutes, you'll have it. "Just give me 10 minutes, hon... I'll be right up." Yeah, right. So for the last two days, I've spent every waking minute -- when I wasn't working at my day job, that is -- almost winning the war. The problem is, close only counts in horseshoes and hand gernades.

For the last two days, I've been playing musical distributions. When one would stump me to the point where further progress was null and void, I'd pull out the disks for another and try to apply all my combined wisdom gained from the previous 30 installations to Yet Another Linux Installation (YALI). I am a certified expert on installing Red Hat 7.1, SuSE 7.2, and Slackware 8.0 on a Dell Inspiron 8000 notebook. I don't even have to think about which buttons to press or dialogs to confirm.

What I really wanted to install on my Inspiron was Slackware 8.0. I like Slackware, and I know enough about it to make it do what I want it to do. Unfortunately, of the three distributions I've been working with, Slack was the only one that I had no success with whatsoever. Version 8 ships with about 7 different kernels; you choose the one you want to install from the first setup screen. The one I really wanted was the bare245.i option. It loaded and processed noticeably faster the others, plus it provided an option during setup to format your filesystems ReiserFS. Which is something I really wanted. My reasoning went like this: the number of times one has to unexpectedly power off a notebook without properly shutting down is far higher than a desktop system; if I had my filesystems running ReiserFS, I wouldn't have to watch fdisk run for 20 minutes when I powered the system back up again. Much to my chagrin, the bare245 kernel consistently crashed with a kernel panic/"could not mount VFS" error on the first reboot. I say consistently because I tried about 6 times to ensure I wasn't doing something wrong. After a day-and-a-half a small light went on somewhere in the back of my brain -- I had seen this error before. SuSE had the same problem about two versions back. You couldn't format your root partition with Reiser. They have since fixed the problem; evidently Slack hasn't. So I tried again. This time I formatted my root partition with EXT2 and the rest Reiser. Sure enough, the system got past the kernel panic only to lock up trying to load the system logging daemon. As Pooh would say, "Bother". I also tried the bare219 kernel and the bareapm219 kernel. The first mysteriously locked during reboot on my first try. I installed again and it booted. To the system logging daemon where it too locked. I finally got a complete installation from one of the 2.19 kernel options, but when I tried to install the latest NVidia drivers (My Inspiron has an NVidia GeForce 2 Go video chipset) I got a screen full of library dependency errors. And that ended my efforts with Slackware 8.0.

I got a fair bit further with Red Hat 7.1. It installed and configured almost everything correctly (no dialog or means to configure a remote Samba printer) -- except X. So I skipped the X configuration part and went with a base "Laptop" install. I then downloaded the latest NVidia drivers for RH, got them installed without incident, and set about configuring X. And set about configuring X. I tried every stinking combination of options and parameters available for XF86Config (I got very good at typing vi XF86Config; startx; vi XF86Config...) I could think of. I read every HOWTO I could find, and every piece of documentation I could locate on the web (and that's a fair bit). After about 12 straight hours of twiddling, I finally got KDE to start with a resolution of 800x600 (which really looked gaudy on my beautiful 1600x1200 screen), with a mouse cursor, with sound. And from that point forward, the system became so unstable it was unusable. So endeth my efforts with Red Hat.

Which leaves SuSE 7.2. SuSE 7.2 does an excellent job of finding and configuring everything I need, right from the get-go. It supports ReiserFS on all partitions during setup. It finds and initializes the PCMCIA slots; it gives me the option of configuring a remote Samba printer; it finds my built-in NIC; it finds and configures my USB ports correctly, right down to the Zip 100 that's attached. You have to flip a switch in /etc/rc.config to start DMA and APM working, but that's no biggie considering some of the other hurdles I've had to leap in the last two days. I even figured out how to get rid of the "graphical command line screen" that the distro uses, and get my command line font down to the size I like. LILO correctly dual boots SuSE and Windows 2000. I even managed to get X to start with a resolution of 1024x768 (well, it's better than 800x600) using the latest NVidia drivers -- after some serious XF86Config tweaking, that is. So what's the problem, you ask? When X starts, I loose the cursor. No mouse, no trackpad, no nada for a pointer. And I'm totally useless in KDE/Gnome without a mouse or pointer of some kind.

I have not thrown in the towel yet, however. I'm too tenacious for that. I can almost taste victory -- just give me another 10 minutes...

This morning I started fresh. I did a clean install of 7.2 (YALI # 42) and I'm currently doing an online update of the entire system. 340-some-odd files. When that's done I'll give SuSE's SAX2 tool a stab at configuring X, and if that fails, I'll create my own base XF86Config file from scratch. I can do that now -- I couldn't two days ago. So I guess I've learned something new. There's definitely something to be said for popping in a Win2K disk and having a fully functioning and useful system (screen resolution: 1600x1200, 32 bit; USB mouse and trackpad and trackpoint all work simultaneously) in just over an hour. I'm going to figure this Linux/Inspiron thing out, though, and document it all somewhere public. Then I'll have paid forward for all the help and insights people like Brian Bilbrey and Greg Lincoln have afforded me over the two years.

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Sunday August 19, 2001

I hate to sound repetitious, but I almost had a working X configuration on Phaedrus yesterday... I should qualify that. I did have a working configuration. The only piece of the puzzle I lacked was high resolution. The best I could come up with was (I think) 1024x768 (hard to tell on this screen without something to compare and contrast to). I've become accustomed to working at 1600x1200 under Windows 2000, and anything lower simply sucks. But I had all the other major pieces conquerered. The OS was stable. X started every time (with one qualification outlined below). I had USB mouse, TrackPad, and TrackPointer -- all useable, and without any special configuration tweaks. Just like it should be. Just as it works under Win2K.

Here's how I got there:

* I started with a clean "default" (no Star Office) install of SuSE 7.2.
* I tweak my LILO.conf file to banish the silly graphics around the command line, set the console font, and have my CDRW recognized as such.
* I tweaked /etc/rc.config to enable APM, IDEDMA, and several other minor tidbits.
* I then used YAST to connect to SuSE's site and did a full system update to the latest packages available. The process worked like a charm, although it took almost three hours to suck down and install the 330 some-odd packages required.
* I then downloaded and installed the required files to bring KDE up to 2.2.
* Next I downloaded and installed the latest NVIDIA drivers from nvidia.com (1.0-1251).
* I then ran SAX2 and let it build me a preliminary XF86Config file. Next I sat down with the 20 odd XF configuration examples I had collected over the last few days and customized, tweaked and twiddled until X started without error and I achieved cursor control from all three pointing devices.

Two problems remained at this point. One, as noted, I hadn't yet found the right combination of parameters to enable 1600x1200. Two, everything worked like a charm as 'root' but when I logged in as 'tom' and ran startx I got a "parse error on line 5". The error stated the parsed had encountered a ^M on the line and everything halted right there. The strange thing was there were no ^M's anywhere in the file.

Sidebar: To strip all ^M's from a file (Windoz convention of adding a <CR>+<LF> to the end of every line), open it in vi and type:

:l,$s/^M//g

Heh. Don't you just love the combination of cryptic and power vi brings to the world of computing?

Anyway, back to the story. The really odd thing was if I logged back in as 'root', X started without incident. Mmm. Cosmic, as Moshe would say.

So I left these two problems to fester in the back of my mind, and we went over to a friend's for a BBQ (Excellent T-Bones, BTW; the best steak I've had all summer). In retrospect, walking away from the problem was apparently a Very Ungood thing to do. It appears to have annoyed the gods of sand and silicon.

I returned some four hours later, fired up Phaedrus (I had shut it down using all the correct procedures), and tried X. No joy. Now I was getting the same parsing error from both 'root' and 'tom'. WTF? I had changed nothing. The only thing I did was shut off the computer while we were out. I don't have a clue. Perhaps my notebook is possessed? More realistically, I think NVIDIA's drivers are still very immature when it comes to notebooks running Linux. I can install them on three totally different distributions and get three totally different sets of configuration problems.

And that, folks, is very definitely a Grand Bother.

I don't want to play this silly game any more today. I'm taking the family to the air show.

Be well, and have a peaceful Sunday.

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