Transition is always a traumatic thing. And so it is now.

My sense is that I lived one life from 0-13 years of age, another from 14-22, another from 23-37, another from 38-60, another from 61-67, and now another from now to ... Whenever next.

Each was a complete package, with a clear delineation between it and the next, so easily archivable and forgotten, for better or worse.

I did read in the Times today that a broken heart really can kill you. The Times have decided to get pugnacious (idiots) and try to charge for their web content (so pound sand) so I can't give you their link. But the article is virulent:

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52318
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_heart
http://news.softpedia.com/news/A-Broken-Heart-Can-Lead-to-Death-Researchers-Say-107907.shtml

(Hullo, Times, do you understand that you are expendable? Idiots...)

Each of these phases were accompanied by some measure of the "broken heart" syndrome.

To find that I am still alive and well despite all that is rather amazing. At least to me.

TBTG.

So at this point I am obviously entering another phase, starting another package.

There is nothing wrong with my brain, and little wrong with my body, but I have not been able to find a suitable job.

Now, granted, that there are a lot of jobs out there, but the operative phrase is "suitable". I have resources so shall not starve, but it was a lot more fun earning what I did before.

But I have not folded the tent. So we shall see.

The plan is to Keep Calm and Carry On and see what the future brings.

At present, I am in the UK attending to the boat. And finding it all exceedingly comfortable, a complete experience of "coming home". Lots of people who look a lot like me doing the things I love to do.


And so it was in the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent, in France.

Went to the Anglers Inn on the edge of the river Thames by Walton-on-Thames and spent about four hours having a thymed lamb roast and a couple of pints of Hobgoblin, watching the families and their children, all blonde and pointy-chinned and mostly blue-eyed.

Basically people just going along, doing their thing, little girls in pretty dresses, little boys stomping in the mud in their wellies, people just being people and loving one another.
As it should be.

TBTG.

So, smile, share, and be kind. Do not let the remaining 2% of the world take you down.

New Media

We've had a good New Media day. We got a new website up yesterday due to popular acclaim and linked it here (I need to figure out to easily link here to there: www.lavarre.org...)

Spent a good part of the day "fixing" DNS settings and Thunderbird.

The DNS (Domain Name Server) settings are handled through NetworkSolutions.com. Pretty good service, but there is some latency in becoming familiar with all the terminology.

For example, consider the domain lavarre.org:

You can create a zillion sub-domains, like  
     www.lavarre.org
     whoever@lavarre.org

and any number of subdomains: pat., penny., christina., etc.

And then you can have sub-subdomains, like:

www.pat.lavarre.org
whoever@pat.lavarre.org
www.penny.lavarre.org
whoever@penny.lavarre.org

And so forth.

you can use the A (address) record to point a subdomain at an Internet Protocol (IP) address.

This is good in that an IP address (IPA) is very, very explicit.

But this is bad in that some services change the numerical address regularly despite keeping a fixed canonical name (CNAME), such as ghs.google.com.

Now, I don't yet really know, but my guess (without further googling) is that ghs stands for Google Hosting Service. And a clever bit of kit is is:

You enter ghs.google.com as your target CNAME in your DNS hosting service (e.g., www.networksolutions.com). Then on the other side of the link (in Google itself) you tell Google what DNS names they should expect to have come knocking at their door.

And it works.

A few whines:

• The NetworkSolutions.com site only allows the numerical IPA in the A record. So you have to ping ghs.google.com to find that number (currently  74.125.53.121)
• Their CNAME section allows you to put in the CNAME, e.g., sites/google.com/site/whateveryoursitename is
• But you can't do both: either the numerical A record or the generic CNAME but not both. I'm not sanguine that they will always use the same IPA for ghs.google.com, so it would be better to be able to include the CNAME in the A record but it is what it is. We shall see.

==========

Once past setting up the site and the DNS (the web works [www.lavarre.org and some others] but still need to solve email) it was on to fixing Thunderbird.

GMail defaults to the IMAP protocol, which leaves all your email on the server. But aside from privacy issues, it is a PITA in that you get all kinds of duplicates. Very confusing. Better to have a POP account that downloads your mail and then you are then responsible for your destiny. (I found a number of I HATE IMAP sites, but I digress). So I set out to kill this particular bête noir. And succeeded.

But as they say, it's easy if you know how, but if not then a challenge. First you have to create a new account and then notice the tiny little Edit button that lets you change a drop down button from IMAP to POP and then change your home directory for the file and then change the IPA for the server and then...

Well, I won't spoil your fun, figure it out, but rest assured, it can be done.


==========

In the process, I recovered a former gmail account file (the last POP file I had successfully attained) that had some very precious work-related messages that I had thought I had lost forever. The sender had moved on so could not be asked to repeat them, nevermind the embarassment of having to ask him to do so...

So I was well pleased with myself... :-)


==========

OK, with all those bragging rights, then I set about cleaning up and reconciling the several POP, IMAP, POP3, IMAP-1, and so forth files. I figured out that deleting the various .msf index files does no harm and allows them to be rebuilt based on the raw data files, e.g., Mail, Sent, Drafts, etc. But after reviewing those accounts and transferring to Local Folders or deleting all their files the data files were still in huge fractions of gigabytes in size. What's going on?!!

Well, just a bit more googling solved it: You have to compact.


http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_Tips_:_Compacting_Folders

And now they are all tiny.

==========

OK, so while we're bragging, we did realize that with all this consolidation we were generating a whole bunch of duplicates in the various folders of Local Folders. So google again, and we first found a Thunderbird addon something like Remove Duplicates (Alternative) with five stars. Woohoo!

Except I couldn't make it work. So then I tried
     Remove Duplicate Messages 0.1.1.10
that works a charm. It even looks across subdirectories to find the dupes, then lists them with its recommendations: delete this, save that.

Of course by now, what with consolidating some four different email accounts over some eight years, I had thousands of dupes, but checking the first few results, they seemed really to make sense. So, close my eyes and (it turns out I had some 60,000 messages) click Delete Selected so that now, poof!, there are only 19,182 left...

The 40,000 are gone, but safely gone, to Trash, so if you really want to wade through some 40,000 messages then you are welcome to do so. Knock yourself out, but also go to counseling for being seriously anal-retentive, and that advice from an accomplished AR veteran.


==========

So, all in all a very good day:

• DNS solved
• POP/IMAP solved
• Critical files recovered
• Files reconciled
• Strong recommendation for a work well done:

          Thunderbird Add-on Remove Duplicate Messages 0.1.1.10

Recommended.

Oh, and OBTW, sites.google.com is really sweet. Well done.

OpenSuSE 11.2 and VMWare Printing

To add a printer to the VMWare VM:

• Ensure the VM is secured.
• Edit Virtual Machine Settings
• Add ...
• Printer
• Power on This Virtual Machine

There are then two choices hp#1 and OfficeJet_6400. hp#1 complains about margins and doesn't print even if you answer yes to the query. Officejet_6400 doesn't complain but prints a header page and then prints the page half an inch too low.

OK, try using these on just plain Linux:
hp#1
No change, it does not print

Officejet_6400
prints the header
%% [ ProductName: GPL Ghostscript ]%%
resulting in the actual print being again too low. We may be able to suppress the header, which would fix both problems.

So it is not a VMware or Windows problem per se, rather something with the Linux setup.

Checking YaST showed that printing was not enabled for hp#1. So we enabled it. Now it prints (all three previous attempts) without the header in the correct position.

Problem solved.

Time to Give Back

OK. I haven't fully gotten this blogging thing completely squared away, but gather I can rant or post information.

I'm pretty much out of rants these days, but have been working hard uncovering weirdness while trying to configure a laptop for my granddaughter Casey.

I've logged the solutions, but had not yet posted them so that others might benefit. So now I do.

The most fearful are those in the bowels of /bin and /etc because you really need to muck about as root and that can be a dangerous thing.

But I have already reinstalled this thing about three times, so it was the time to go a bit further:

Problem: All of a sudden I get

Permissions on the password database may be too restrictive
su: incorrect password

when trying to change to root with the su - command.

"All of a sudden" because I had not done anything (I swear!) other than restore the root password which had gone south a few days ago.

Googling brings all kinds of interesting stuff, all of which I tried with no success.

Solution:
This worked:

+ Log in as normal, going to user through the preestablished automatic login.

+ Log out as user and back in as root.

+ Go to YaST > Security > Local > Security Overview. We find Use secure file permissions disabled. Enabled it and set it to Easy.

AND THAT FIXED IT.

It's easy when you know how.

=====

Of all the intermediary research and trial and error that I went through in getting here, one source I would recommend is /etc/permissions. I had wanted to find something like this a long time ago without success. This file and its associated ...easy, ...standard, ...paranoid parallels are the basis for the Linux file ownership and permissions system.

You use them (as root in a rescue login) with

chkstat -set /etc/permissions
or
chkstat -set /etc/permissions.{easy,secure,paranoid}

or call

SuSEconfig

as YaST does after it thinks that files have been modified in the system.

Hope this helps.

Virtualization

Your mileage may vary, but as of 10/25/09, VMWare is the winner. We have spent several weeks playing with the latest versions of CrossOverOffice for Linux (CXO) and Sun's VirtualBox (SVB). Both are brilliant in their own way. But in the end, you get what you pay for.

CXO does very well with its "supported" applications, but I have found little or none beyond that. The most frustrating part is USB support, which seems to be nil, no matter how many hacks I try.

SVB is much snappier than VMware, but again the USB support is spotty. I have documented all this, it just doesn't work all that well. I've RTFI'd the help file and discovered you need to define at least one "filter" for USB devices. This does not appear after hours of googling. But I have done so for all available devices, but it just works for one, the Nokia phone.

Below is a synopsis:

I've had a very pleasant experience with the latest CrossOver Office (CXO) 8.0.0 for Linux ($70)  with the apps that they "support". I can now use Word, Excel, without the huge disk-thrashing overhead of the XP OS.

It Turns Out That both Word and Excel are really quite snappy apps; their generally perceived sluggishness is due the OS, *NOT* the app. I can prove this by comparing response times on the app on WinXP versus response time on CXO. The difference is amazing. If I were the project manager for either MSWord or MSExcel I would prolly be hugely PO'd by the sluggishness rendered by the underlying OS...

On The Other Hand... :-(

CXO USB support and support for "unsupported" apps are less than marginally acceptable. They need an auto-discovery routine that will bring up ndiswrapper and prompt for the drivers. Or something.  Hey, dmesg and hal know instantly when you plug in a USB device. So it is very doable, but after several hours of experimenting each day for about a week I can only connect to USB memory devices that are recognized and mounted as drives by the host. So this leaves out:

+ Garmin GPS products
+ Nokia phones
+ ICOM radios
+ RayTech products

And a few other programs that are only available in MSWin such as:

+ NLReg
+ AimKeys
+ Adobe Acrobat
+ ...

In short, CXO does not support the only few remaining reasons to use MSWin: niche applications and USB dependent applications.

Graphics, communications, computer admin, media, music, photos, browsers, office apps, finance, all the rest of the mainstream I can do on Linux without even a Whiff of the MS stench.

(Sorry for the arcane allegory: Newport RI has a huge sewage problem that has them tearing up almost every street in the town trying to fix... Huge trenches, beaches closed, overflowing manholes... A third world country. So you spend a lot of time holding your nose...
 :-( 

(But the comparison is valid, be it MSWin or sewage: almost everywhere you go you find this stench so it takes extraordinary effort to avoid it...)

Anything mainstream that MSWin can do Linux can do better. But I need MSWin to run my little toys...

[OBTW, what in the world possessed them to totally hose the menu on Office 2007 with  eye-candy to completely confound over fifteen years of conventional usage and come up with a file format that is not backwards compatible with said over fifteen years of data?! The menu is just a single layer of eye-candy under which lies the old familiar File>Edit>View menu, but it takes you several days of frustration to figure that out. And the use of XML is just politically correct breast beating. Sure, introduce the new format as an option, but don't make it the default without warning! YOH! I have work to do. Time is money and you are costing me money!!

[Oh, and while you're screwing up my format and telling me that there are four cells whose formats are not backwards compatible how about giving me a [Find] choice instead of playing "I have a secret"?

[Cretins.

[But I digress.]

In short, there are only two reasons for using CXO:

+ Snappy performance of "supported" apps on Linux, compared to the sluggish performance on XP, whether on actual or virtual hardware (I can see no difference between the latter two)

+ Political activism for OS iconoclasm. Which I support.

So where does that leave us?

Well:

+ Native Win2k/WinXP/whatevah (Have you noticed the quiet death of Vista? Actually, it was stillborn...)

+ CXO for Linux for "supported" Apps

+ Virtual machines with MS Operating Systems for the rest of the niche and USB requiring Windows programs:

- VMWare on Linux Host with whatevah client

- VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/)on Linux Host with whatevah client

AFAICT, mounting WinXP on any of these seems to be about the same. Tons of disk thrashing. And yes, I have googled extravagantly trying to find a solution. It just doesn't seem to exist. Please tell me if you know of one.

My sense is that VirtualBox is cleaner and leaner than VMWare. And it certainly is infinitely cheaper (any number divided by zero goes to infinity...  :-) 

I know VMWare, VMWare is a friend of mine, but it also is rather dear in this domain and AFAICT no better, and perhaps worse, than VirtualBox.

Except that it works.

You get what you pay for.

Connected!

Finally.

I've been struggling for quite some time to connect my Linux machine to the Internet via the cellphone. Today I cracked it.

There have been a several issues:

* SuSE 11.1 Bluetooth is broken, AFAICT. At least I can't get it going right. I had it working just fine on SuSE 10.2 but the 11 series release broke a lot of stuff. I had ppp working over Bluetooth on SuSE 10.2, but haven't yet succeeded on 11.1.

* AT&T pulled the ability to "tether" (connect through a phone) from my plan a year or so. It was working fine (again on SuSE 10.2) and then one day it just stopped. They said it should never have worked, but whatever. So now I have a plan that explicitly allows tethering.

* The newer versions (6.9, 7.0) of Nokia PC Suite just didn't work on my Windows 2000 installation on VMWare on SuSE.

But after returning from a wonderful holiday in Europe and the UK I got to work:

* First I created a new virtual machine and installed Windows XP. Time consuming (about a week) of reinstalling all the software and sorting things out, but it is all working, including PC Suite this time. So I could connect to the Windows instantiation, but still not to Linux.

* Installing PC Suite brought a phone firmware upgrade, so more time adapting to that.

* And then last night I found http://www.joiku.com/index.php. It is self described as a web community for free software. Well, maybe, but it points you to http://www.joikushop.com/index.php to buy software, albeit at very low prices.

I registered with the first URL with no problem, although have had some issues with the latter that they are working on. At any rate, I found JoikuSpot. This is a little program that turns your cell phone into a WiFi hotspot! With encryption, no less. And no proprietary tricks. So it works with Linux! 'Way cool.

There are some fiddly bits, but these were resolved with only a few hours of methodical experimentation.

So I recommend it. It has solved a long list of ToDos for me.

Here are the fiddly bits:

* Make sure that you set your WLAN to "AD HOC" mode, NOT "Managed".

* Set the network card to DHCP and add 192.168.2.1 as the explicit default gateway.

* Choose ASCII type keyword, not "Hex" or "Passphrase".

* Choose a keyword that does NOT include apostrophe or quote marks. (/etc/sysconfig/ifcfg files store field values delimited by apostrophes or quotes, so cannot handle passwords with those characters.)

* Choose WEP-open, 128-bit encryption NOT WEP-shared. Ensure the keyword is exactly 13 characters.

* Use ip addr to check the IP address of the client after network setup. Try pinging the host: ping 192.168.2.1

If it does not respond then reboot the client machine.

Oh, and of course RTFM. It is at User Guide.

Thanks JoiKu!

Audio Fix for SuSE 11.1 and VMware

We are now doing regular meetings on a collaboration site on Windows, so I need audio. I run Windows when necessary in a sandbox (VMware: http://www.vmware.com/). I was able to hear myself speaking in the headset earphone, I was able to hear a "presence", but could not hear other participants and they could not hear me.

It turns out that VMware runs the OSS (Open Sound System) instead of ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). The solution to the hearing problem is to patch the basic VMware script to preload an ALSA-OSS wrapper. The solution to the recording problem was to access the Capture module of the sound system and turn it on.

Details
Player Sound
Initially there was no sound, so I went to the Linux audio control (KMix) and found the first control ("Front") muted. Unmuting it now gives a presence, but no apparent control of volume. I tried starting Amarok. It played, but no sound. I then ran

yast2 sound &

in a root terminal to check the settings. The presence disappeared when YaST started up. I reset all the values, restarted the sound system, restarted KMix, then checked it to find the first control ("Front") muted again. Unmuting it restored the presence. Restarted Amarok, now we have sound on Linux.

Now I started VMware as user. It reports:

Failed to open sound device /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy.
Failed to connect virtual device sound.

The link

http://symbolik.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/vmware-server-104-and-kernel-26231-on-gutsy/

says that VMware uses OSS, not ALSA. I checked for the existence of all the requisite files following that link. They all exist, so VMware is just not loading them.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=331175

recommends patching the basic VMware script. Issshhhh (large sucking through the teeth sound...)

Before taking the plunge of patching the basic vmware script I ran yast2 sound to make sure it is using the cited device /dev/dsp. YaST doesn't say, but I turned on pulse audio, brought up Amarok and the mixer to check things. Amarok was already up in the system tray, so I shut it down completely and ran VMware one more time.

No change, no sound, no connection to the dsp. So bit the bullet:

cp /usr/bin/vmware /usr/bin/vmware.orig
kate /usr/bin/vmware

I added the following comments and command at the start of the script:

# 090811 patch to use alsa sound vice oss
LD_PRELOAD=libaoss.so exec

# the remainder of the original script

Then saved it and ran

chmod +x /usr/bin/vmware

just to be safe. I then restarted VMware normally as user.

No joy.

I tried starting VMware with the sound card disabled and then activating it after vmware was up and running. No joy.

So shutdown and rebooted the entire system, then restarted VMware without touching any audio apps and making sure that no audio apps were running.

Now it loads!!! WE HAVE SOUND!!! And VMware finds the device and Windows now has player sound.

But no record sound.

Record Sound

The microphone connection is working: I can hear the microphone in the earphone and muting the mike in KMix makes that go away. But KRecord does not record any sound.

First step: Google:

http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/402106-no-sound-new-suse-11-1-a.html

says to try the following to test speakers:

speaker-test -c2 -l5 -twav

This gives five renditions of "Front left" although zero renditions of "Front right" or anything else.

arecord -d 10 myrecording.wav

gives a ten second recording of... nothing. :-(

/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh

does a number of tests on the sound system and saves the results in /tmp/alsa-info.txt.
It cites
E-sound daemon: Running - No.

and then a raft of other details, including:

Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
Capabilities: cvolume cswitch
Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Capture 0 - 46
Front Left: Capture 45 [98%] [28.00dB] [off]
Front Right: Capture 45 [98%] [28.00dB] [off]

This implies that KMix should have a module for capture and that it is presently muted.

I added the Capture channel (KMix > Menu > Settings > Configure Channels) and checked its checkbox.

Then tested with KRecord. It works!!!

Now, try on VMware. It works too!

I love it when a thing works out right...