Getting back into it

Knowing I want to install Sun's Java 6 SE for working on my future projects, I booted into Linux and downloaded that as well as Firefox 2. Java will have to wait to be installed, but thanks to a previous post I was able to update with little difficulty.

I *do* need to look into properly breaking symbolic links... but that too will need to wait for another day.

Design time starts soon... linuxing is coming back into style. ;)

New ideas on the horizon

I still have to admit that I have done very little in Linux as of late. When I use it everyday, as I set out to do, I have things to write on here. There is always something new to document or comment on.

Well, I have upcoming projects and ideas. And some of them will be carried out much better in Linux than in Windows, so I will naturally find myself linuxing again.

Some of the ideas include: design (using The Gimp, and Inkscape) and programming (Java applets). Then, of course, there was my promise to design a template for this site entirely in Linux. That's something to look forward to as well. Woot!

Ninth order of business

Here's a new goal to list. Unfortunately it is low on the totem pole at the moment. (Thus the "Ninth order of business" title.)

I'm going to design a Blogger template especially for Slackware Noob. Whoo! And I'll do it entirely in Linux (no cheating!! I promise!) and I can be proud of whatever I end up with. Yep... that totally came to me out of nowhere, as I was looking at the very blah, stock design that is currently Slackware Noob.

That must change.

Pretty fonts

In my goals to develop and design primarily out of linux, I decided to see what installing fonts was like in Slackware. Like everything else, it's really hard until you figure something out that works! The joys of linux!

The super duper easy way I discovered is to use the KDE window manager font installation feature. I tried a number of other things (some of which REALLY messed things up... I won't expand on those tonight.) but here is what worked and my primary source of usefulness on the issue. http://penguinfonts.com/howto/slackware.php

First off, you can choose to follow step #3 to install the standard MS Windows fonts if you want 'em. Then (for me, anyway) I had to add in another series of steps. From the command line I had to run:

mkfontscale
mkfontdir
fc-cache -f -v
xset fp rehash


FIRST.... if you're like me, these apps won't be runnable without putting the full path in front. For me I had to "whereis" every one (the first "word" of each command) to figure out where they actually lived. Then it was smooth sailing. I exited X (if I was in it) and started it up again. The newly installed fonts magically appeared in apps like The GIMP and Inkscape. Whoo!

I have a TON of fonts that I've collected and used in Windows so just to make life easy enough for now, I wanted to install the same fonts that I currently have installed. I have my C: drive mapped to /c-drive (this happened magically on Slackware setup... I must have done something right!!!) and my fonts are under /c-drive/Windows/fonts. I just copied them all to a more local location. (It ended up being /usr/local/share/ttf due to some earlier font installation attempts that didn't quite work out.) What worked for me was (as already mentioned) going into KDE (instead of Freerock Gnome, in my case) and following PenguinFonts step #1a, heading into the Control Center.

To make this work all the way, I had to go into Administration Mode (root password required) and then add fonts, selecting all the ready-to-be-added fonts. After that operation was successful, I again had to follow those four steps (as discussed above) and then restart X. Amazingly (after much pain in the process) it worked.

Now.... all I want to know is, if I install ALLLLLL my fonts (including the many that I do not have load up on start up in Windows) ... will that slow down Slackware? Is the startup affected similarly?? Hmmmm....

(P.S. I do not like xdm. I accidently take myself into it, when I'm really looking for xwmconfig. Argh. I can never get completely out of xdm without a total restart. ARGH!!)

Beautiful! I can SEE!

Today, I set out to figure out how to make X Windows deliver a higher resolution, so I can take advantage of my nice 19" LCD monitor.

I started off by downloaded the latest version of XFree86 which can be downloaded from The XFree86 Project site. The most up to date stable version is 4.6.0 and that's what I downloaded. I followed the instructions, checking there was a suitable version available, backing things up myself, etc. and everything seemed to go relatively smoothly.

The configuration wasn't so easy for me for some reason. It wasn't all horrible or anything but the wizards just weren't helping to make the difference I was looking for. Things were all fuzzy at X-Windows startup but would sort of re-adjust. This first good thing I noticed is that it was dispaying things at my monitor's maximum resolution of 1280x1024. But it was doing so off-centre, as well as that fuzzy issue at startup and the occasional weird blip. This just would not do.

I looked around online a bit and ended up downloading the NVIDIA driver for my particular video card. I had already been messing around in the XFreeConfig file (which I learned is eerily similar to the xorg.conf file that I used to edit, but learned that only one or the other gets used by the X-server. With this new XFree install, all the edits had to be made to the XFreeConfig file instead *sigh*) and had already adjusted my monitor's horizontal and vertical sync rates as listed in the manual. And after downloading and installing the NVIDIA driver -- which went smoothly -- the configuration stuff -- once again -- didn't really work for me..... actually I think it altered the wrong config file which really does not make things work. So I ended up manually editing the XFreeConfig file again... but I had some help in this one.

One little hitch that might be specifically worthwhile mentioning, in editing the XFreeConfig file to use the NVIDIA driver (instead of a generic or open source version) I made the -- possibly pointless -- decision to change the identifier of the driver, since it wasn't generic anymore. I quickly learned that the graphics device identifier is referenced later on in the file under the Screen section, so I made it all confused when I made that change. The fix was easy though, I just had to change the identifier in the Screen section of the file as well. (Or could have just left all the identifiers alone and not been so picky!)

Once I fired X-Windows up again, everything seems great!! :) No fuzzy startup. Still the good resolution. No weird flickering. Everything is back on centre. I'll take it. It's beautiful.

And it's interesting to note that the NVIDIA driver will support 2D and 3D stuff... not that I'll mess with that too much, but it just sounds cool. :)

It's the little things

Ever notice how the little things either make or break a situation? Well, the "little thing" of forgetting all my linux passwords really put me in a crumby mood. (Until it got all fixed! Yay!)

But on the flip side, figuring out how to make my scroll mouse actually SCROLL was a little thing that has made Linux more appealing to use again. I absolutely hated not being able to scroll while surfing the web. That makes it pretty annoying and makes me less likely to use Slackware everyday, which was the whole idea when I started on this journey.

Well, today, one of my original "I gotta figure this out" issues was conquered! HURRAH! Here's how I did it.

First, I got some inspiration from HOWTO_Advanced_Mouse @ gentoo-wiki.com. I started by commenting out all the mouse related code in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. For example, for all of the current settings, I stuck # it WAS: in front of the line, so I knew what to revert back to if things went bad. (Another good idea is to make a copy of the original file before you mess with it. I had already done this from a previous attempt at making scrolling work.)

Next, I tried what the site suggested as my "edited configuration". This actually caused all kinds of problems for me, but nothing was insurmountable. I discovered that for my setup, I had to do the following:

...
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
...

If you are comparing to the example given on the link, it might be helpful to understand that the mouse I have really is a 5-button mouse. (Left and right buttons, scroll up, scroll down, and pressing the scroller down as a button.) Having it marked as 7 just made everything all confused. So because there are only 5, the ZAxisMapping option had to be set to "4 5" to jive with that. But, how did I figure that much out???

Well, first, let's take a step back for a moment. The scrolling stuff actually did get recognised by the 7 button configuration on the other site. How do I know this? Because I used the xev program (X-event tester) to find out that it did. A very nifty tool indeed! :)

BUT, next I went into Firefox in hopes of scrolling up and down on web pages all over the place. I quickly learned that trying to scroll with the mouse actually behaved like the "Back" and "Forward" buttons. Since my habit is to go up and down on a page, this was EXTREMELY annoying as my scrolling habits caused me to go to already visited pages. Oh, it was horrible. Trust me.

Then I met another useful link, addressing the specific scrolling issue in Firefox @ linuxquestions.org and learned that if I changed the ZAxisMapping to "4 5", all would be well after starting X up again. And amazingly, it was. :) I ran xev to make sure it still recognised everything. Then I bravely returned to Firefox. And the rest is (happy) scrolling history.

One more "little thing"....

I also figured out how to change the keyboard sensitivity in X so that I can hold down a key and it will actually repeat now. Very handy for those times you really need the Backspace key, or REALLY want to type hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

In case anybody is searching for this answer, look for your settings or preferences menu in your particular window manager. I'm currently using Freerock GNOME. I went to Desktop --> Preferences --> Keyboard. Once there, select "Key presses repeat when key is held down" and set the speed and delay properties to your tastes. Me? I like high speed and a touch of delay. Don't tell the cops! ;)

Password-ly Relief!

Here I sit typing, with a weight recently lifted from my shoulders, from (dun dun dunnnnn!) Linux! Wuhhoo!!

OK, so first, here is what I did to fix the password problems (that stemmed from my brain-dead-ness problems... but that's for my personal blog instead of here!)

At the LILO boot prompt, instead of pressing the Enter key like usual, I typed this:
mount root=/dev/hdb3 init=/bin/bash

What this appears to do is mount the specified partition as root. I, conveniently, chose the partition I use as root to be the root partition. Nice, eh? (If I understand correctly, I think people can get all fancy and have other partitions that are bootable and this allows the user to boot into any bootable partition.)

The next bit is the "init" part. This took me right into the bash shell as root user WITHOUT a password. Yay! This was the first part of the mission accomplished. Going into the bash shell seemed to work for me... I think I happen to use bash as my default shell, so if you use something else perhaps you need to indicate what shell? And maybe it doesn't matter. I really don't know.

So, to change passwords I used the nifty, my-new-best-friend, command passwd. By typing in either passwd root or simply passwd (because we're already logged in as root) we can set a new password without ever needing to remember the old one. (Which I did actually remember, by the way... after resetting the password. *sigh*)

To be thorough in the process, I decided to reset the user passwords too... which meant I had to remind myself of what usernames I had set up. Turns out I only had one, and I found that by doing a simple ls /home to see all the user directories. From here I used the passwd to reset my username password.

Sounds fairly painless, doesn't it?

I was relieved (and yet also somewhat startled) to learn that there are a number of ways to work around this (very noob-ish) problem. Here are a couple of links that helped me get to my solution. There are tons out there, and I had to try a few things before getting this to work, but it worked. :) Hurrah!

"Ack! I forgot my root password!" @ everything2.com

some conversational tidbits @ quotesdb.info

A lesson learned the hard way

This is so embarassing.

The lesson that is being leared the hard way (that just might get harder very soon) is that I have totally forgotten my Linux passwords, and even the usernames. THIS is a HUGE problem.

If I figure my way out of this one without installing, I will definitely let the world know.

What a noob.

UPDATE: Problem solved! See this post: Password-ly Relief

Back at /home?

I ended up doing a little Java programming tutoring this evening at the University. Ahhh, sitting in the back of the lab where I had my first ever Java programming labs. It was a touching moment.

It was a cool night that helped to spark me back into my technical, geeky side. Makes me want to boot into Linux right now, but alas, I have an 8:30 morning class and don't have the "stay up typing until 3AM" stamina that I used to have. (And I don't really want it back either!)

BUT... I do have a new goal for my Linux-ing. I want to install the latest and greatest version of Java... maybe some of the "cooler" stuff too, like getting into Beans and Enterprise stuff. Anyway, if I download it and get it all set up *just right* then maybe I'll log into Linux more often to teach myself some new stuff, follow along with tutorials, make my Java knowledge a little less archaic, etc. :)

Other things I must, must, must prepare for in the Linux world is visual design and web based development stuff. I gotta get set up for that because I need to be doing that too. Eek.... what am I messing around in Windows for?! I can't get my work done here....

Onward, back to Slackware!!

Just a quick Linux moment

I couldn't resist ... I booted into Linux for about 40 minutes tonight.

I think I did it in hopes to download Rogue (a Dungeon and Dragons like game, I guess) for Linux. I grew up on this game on our old PCs and never conquered it. I thought it would be cool to put it into something closer to it's original environment. But I didn't find what I was looking for -- granted I didn't try very hard.

Instead I started messing with the external DVD burner ... I don't know why, seeing I didn't anticipate it working out, but I actually figured out how to get it recognised, which is rather cool.

First I learned about the command: lsusb which lists all the stuff attached to USB ports. It found both the burner and the webcam. Kind of cool.

Then, I read something about saying that /dev/scd0 would be the external drive. I don't know *why* this is the case, but it turns out to be true in my case.

Next (as root), I mounted the external drive (a few different ways, but settled on the following...) ... seeing that /mnt/cdrom was not in use, I went for mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom and then found a movie player already installed that recognised the DVD in the drive. (And any fellow newbies, don't forget to unmount when you're done. umount /mnt/cdrom )

Now, I'm not totally satisfied. I did get the sound quality to improve, with a little more tweaking within alsamixer but the picture quality wasn't as good as what I use in XP. :( Seemed jerky and stuff... it might need better drivers or something? Also, I have noted that I cannot get a better screen resolution than 1024x768 ... which is a silly thing, considering my lovely 19" LCD monitor.

And before I forget, for some reason, I can't press a keyboard key, hold it down, and input more than one character. This is annoying for backspace or when I really want to type hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That, also, is just silly.

But all of that is for another day.

Interesting discoveries

Maybe that would be better represented as "Inadvertant discoveries" but anyway...

I was simply trying to check off one of my goals tonight. I did some googling about to find what might be workable and I learned that, once I take the time to do it, my scanner should work no problem, and also that my printer works better than I thought. (Some of the problems I had were my not paying attention to configuration details; for example having the default page size as A4 instead of Letter... no wonder things were going off the page. Duh!)

Then I thought I'd look for making my scroll wheel mouse working properly. This sounded like it might be "simple" and scrolling is something I miss desperately. So I stumbled onto a very interesting site. It's not quite a newbie site, but it has some great tips and ideas for configuring Slackware. Here's the link: How To Properly Set Up Slackware Linux. I'll be referring to it again soon, I'm sure.

Anyway, I found some simple instructions on how to get my mouse to scroll again (which I cannot confirm yet, since I haven't logged in -- or rebooted -- with the new settings in place) but then I wandered off into the guy's thoughts on window managers and his recommend of Gnome (which I noticed yesterday didn't come with Slackware :( I always used to like switching back and forth depending on what games I wanted to play! ;)) which lead me to "Freerock GNOME" which I had never heard of before. Since there sound like a number of advantages to having Freerock specifically, and I also was planning to download GNOME anyway, I thought I'd go ahead with the download.

The site offered a "simple", one-click install ... well not really one-click, but one-step. I typed in a single line on the command line and let it do this "simple" install do it's magic. (Especially since I had a failed Wine installation earlier on today ... I'll have to try downloading and installing the Windows emulating software from another interesting site: LinuxPackages.net

WELL...
I didn't read closely enough, but somehow I get away with that fact this time.

Turns out that this magic all-in-one installing thing is really just that... not only is it downloading and installing Freerock GNOME, it's also downloading and installing EVERY out of date Slackware dependency. I believe this is because of some magical, wonderful thing called slapt-get which appears to enjoy maintaining Slackware installs. Methinks that Mr. Slapt-Get and I might just become close friends.

Meanwhile, this entire updating process is taking a LONG time. I had NO idea what I was getting myself into! But it's still happening much quicker than me manually doing it all, etc. Right now it's downloading more stuff specifically for installing Freerock.

Elsewhere, I read today that Slackware 11.0 is being released soon. That's just like me going to all this trouble when a whole new version is on the way. I'll probably stick with 10.2 for a little while, unless I learn that 11.0 has something amazing that I simply cannot live without.

Well, I'm trying to read about XML while I'm waiting for this thing to finish up, so I can find out if my mouse works and if GNOME was installed, etc. So I take my leave for now.

More installing, devel & design

First before I jump into my goals, let me just amaze you with what all I've done since my last post. Actually, last night after posting, I decided to go ahead and try to install/upgrade/update/whatever! some more applications.

I had already downloaded the latest Thunderbird version so I decided to tackle it next. I just followed a similar scheme to my grand experiences installing Firefox. I approached this install with more confidence and also did a little experimenting in the process. All in all, it ended up working out just the same.

Then, I installed my first package. I wanted to update Gaim because it seemed that there were issues with the version that came pre-installed. So I hoped that the latest version would help. For Gaim, the downloads were either source (bleck!) or RPM type packages. I thought I'd go the package route, thus I downloaded and let KPackage do it's thing.

At first, I wasn't even sure if it did anything. I launched Gaim and discovered that it still worked -- although I really figured it was still the old version. But once it was up and running, the version info told me that this was indeed what I had just installed. And it works better too. Rah!

This brings us to today -- a day I chose to keep Windows XP on, quite honestly. If I left Linux up I would tinker all day (I did enough of that as it was) and I really have a lot of other things in life going on right now so I needed to lessen the temptation. I must admit, I did login to Slackware once today. And guess what I did in that time? (Besides playing Spider....) I downloaded and installed Apache HTTP server. Whoo! :)

With that said, now I will talk about more goals!

One of the reasons I decided to get back into Linux is having a stable and responsive system to do nearly any kind of design or development stuff that I want. I have a number of outstanding and/or upcoming projects that I need a better, more friendly environment to work within.

So I'm all happy about being able to attempt website design (no matter the size or intent) all in a single system. I can use one of the awesome development tools available via Open Source or stick to a simple text editor. I can have a server or two running, utilise different languages, have as many databases I need, and see how it all looks and works without having to upload anything. Can this be done in Windows? Yes I think so, to an extent. But Windows is so messed up right now, and so sluggish and, yah, I'd rather develop in Linux. So I'm going to.

Also, I'm looking forward to getting thicker into visual design work, using nifty tools like The Gimp and whatever else I can find -- without having them crash and burn in Windows every so many minutes.

And, I don't know, somehow, it just makes me feel just a little bit smarter again. Silly to some, but quite nice right now. Even if I am just a noob.

Some goals... while I'm thinking of it.

So far, right off the bat from my install, I have managed to get networking and sound up and running.

Here's what's currently on my hit list:
- figuring out why my internet connection can be slow or delayed
- getting my printer (Canon S750) to work PROPERLY, not just somewhat (I know it worked under Red Hat 7.3 *argh*)
- getting the scroll button/wheel on my mouse to work (I miss scrolling *sniff*) [UPDATE: Mission Accomplished!! See: It's the little things]
- being able to use my scanner (HP scanjet 2200c)
- being able to use my webcam (a Logitech something...)
- being able to access my new external DVD burner (Sony DRX-810UL)
- being able to access my photos/videos on my digital camera (Sony Cybershot DSC-P52)

There are a ba-zillion things to figure out. All sorts of software to update. I'm also planning to install the latest kernel to see if it improves on any hardware compability issues. We'll take that one very slowly, methinks.

I don't even know what software is on here, to be honest! So I'm just going on trying to use this "as normal" and try to figure out how to make something work if I need it (or switching to Windows XP if I'm short on time, patience, or otherwise know that it won't work).

Sounds like a long-term goal, this get comfy with Slackware thing, doesn't it?

"Installing" my first application

Well, really, all I was wanting to do was upgrade. Go from Firefox 1.0.6 (that came with the linux installation) allllllll the way up to Firefox 1.5.0.4. Simple right? Well, yah, I guess it is if you know what you're doing! Or, no, not so simple if you really just want to go 'click, click, ok' like in some other OSes, or if you get to use a "package". Well, I'm sort of somewhere in between, but still not really confident about knowing what I'm doing!

I logged in as "root" and downloaded the tarball to my home directory. Then I found a little (and I mean little) blurb on the Firefox site about untarring the download where you want the app installed within linux, which is (sort of) great, except: (a) I didn't know where it ought to be installed; and (b) I was hoping that I was upgrading, not really installing. I know how to untar something... I'm not a complete Linux n00b, but in Linux I've only ever done what I've had to do. It's a whole other ballgame to do the things I want to do, as well.

Anyway, I did some googling and poked around my filesystem trying to figure out what's up. Things started coming back to me, things long lost since my school-related linuxing days. I managed to track down where all the application files seem to be. A mysterious place called: /usr/lib/ -- this place contained a directory full of Firefox 1.0.6 files, so I know I was on to something, no matter how small that something was.

I tried to "install" 1.5.0.4 by untarring into /usr/lib/ but all that did was attempt (and fail) to overwrite the symbolic link called "firefox" with a directory full of stuff also called "firefox". OK, fine. I get that... well kind of. What the heck is a symbolic link, anyway?

Actually, I knew I used them all the time. I knew they were handy little pointers to big ugly long pathnames, making life much easier in general. But I had never actually had to create or destroy them. I'm sure any experienced linuxer reading this (I'm sorry!) is laughing at me by now, since symbolically linking files is absolutely no big deal. But isn't it quite normal to be afraid of the unknown? ;)

Anyway, I deleted the old Firefox directory and the symbolic link that linked to the "firefox-bin" file within in... after taking careful note of what it was linking too. After all, I want to be like all the cool kids who use symbolic links to run Firefox. Then, it was time to start fresh. The idea of simply upgrading -- as I had always thought of it, I mean -- had totally flown out the window by this point. This was essentially a fresh install... only my settings saved elsewhere were safe. (I hoped.)

Here's what I tried, from within /usr/lib/:

mkdir firefox-1.5.0.4
cd firefox-1.5.0.4
tar -xvzf ~/firefox-1.5.0.4.tar.gz
cd ..
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.4/firefox/firefox-bin firefox

By the end of all that, I had myself the new Firefox files all laid out AND a symbolic link to firefox-bin, just like I saw was there before. Now it should work, right??

WRONG!

Ouch. With the old version completely deleted and the new version not being happy with me I had no working Firefox anymore. :( Now what? Open up one of the other million browsers that got installed (I chose Mozilla) and do some more googling, that's what! That in itself didn't solve my problem, but having my Google powers back made me feel better.

I poked around the filesystem a little while longer. IF I had been brilliant, I would have typed: whereis firefox and learned where all "firefox"-es lived. Instead I kept poking until something finally felt sorry for me and told me that there was also something I should be looking at in /usr/bin/. Off to /usr/bin/ I went, called up the directory listing and scrolled WAY up to find a very firey red looking "firefox" ... a symbolic link that got busted when I did my rash of deletions, no doubt.

I put my new symbolic linking skills to work, first examing what the broken link was supposed to be. Then deleting it completely. Time to link again! Wuhhoo!

ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.4/firefox/firefox firefox

Although that just looks like I keep repeating myself, having acquired some kind of repetitive word typing disorder during this time of Firefox-less stress, I bravely called on Firefox to load up again... and...

IT ACTUALLY WORKED!!

Amazing how little things (that seem so huge at the time) can be so rewarding. So steps similar to these will I follow to "upgrade" Thunderbird and Gaim. And I'm sure they'll come in useful for first time installs too! That is, unless I'm missing something and don't know it yet. But, guess what? I'm typing up this blog post using Firefox 1.5 within Slackware 10.2 and so far it goes quite well. :)

It's amazing what a little time and determination can accomplish.

Inaugural entry

Yesterday I went through the daunting task of installing Slackware 10.2, a linux distribution known for it's non-user-friendliness.

Why did I do it? Why bother since Red Hat 7.3 has sat almost untouched on my linux partition for the last two years? What do I hope to acheive by "slacking off"? And what little things am I learning along the way, that I want to share, but also want to remember!?

This is the place to find out. My regular blog readers won't particularly care, so I am sending all such important things to this very spot.

Linux for everyday? Let's find out how that goes!