An introduction to symbolic linking

Hot on the heels of Marcel Gagne's article about jPodder, I wrote an article about how to link to applications so they appear on the KDE desktop. The article is based on SuSE 9.3, but would likely apply to most users using KDE.

The file is a 107k pdf: symboliclinking.pdf

Linux at it's best

I have been using Ubuntu for the past 2 months or so. It has been a very educational experience so far and for the most part ease of use has been optimal. Tomorrow I will start having fun remoting to my desktop computer from where I volunteer, lets just see how my Linux knowledge has grown! Well I am truely impressed. I have gotten to where I am able to do most things as instructed when asked with little effort other than maybe a booboo or 2 so I am going to keep plugging away at it and see where this new knowledge will take me.

New screen shot

Since moving to Ubuntu I decided to throw up a screen shot of the theme I'm using, one more thing that makes Linux pretty cool. I know, themes are not productive, but I enjoy looking at a cool desktop.

I also noticed that Ubuntu has the package for Bnetd, the Battlenet server. This means it'll be easy to set up a Linux Diablo II server...which leads me to mention a new blog I started, Diablo Adventures.

Blog Entry Poster on Ubuntu Hoary

I made the switch from SuSE 9.3 to Ubuntu Hoary because The Working Centre is handing out a few more boxes with Ubuntu Linux installed. The switch paid off today when someone asked me "how do I send a file from a floppy disk to someone on my hotmail account?" They knew how to access the floppy in Windows, and when I showed them all they had to do was click Places -> Computer -> Floppy they were quite satisfied they could do it on their own.

I was also going through the software on Ubuntu Hoary and it's amazing! At the moment I'm using Blog Entry Poster, some software available for Hoary, to compose this entry. And while the software is really basic, there is another blogging software package I've yet to try, and a few dozen games I installed for my other blog: Linux-Games.Ca

Until next post...

Better Google searches with Konqueror

Konqueror has always been my favourite web browser. While Konqueror has some rendering problems Mozilla does not, I've always found things faster using Konqueror, The search field in the top right side of Mozilla FireFox is a powerful feature, but coming from the DOS days I'm use to using hot keys, so I find it quicker to use the keyboard than to mouse up and type something. Ctrl+o opens a dialog box in which you can enter URLs in Konqueror. Konqueror also has quick search strings for Google, dictionary.com, freshmeat, sourceforge and a few other web sites. Simply type the shortcut letters in the URL dialog box, followed by a colon and the term you're looking for. If you wanted to search for The Gimp on Google you'd type:

gg: The Gimp

There are dozens of shortcuts which you can discover on your own by clicking Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Web Shortcuts. The shortcuts I use most are:

gg: Google search
ggi: Google image search
fm: Freshmeat search
sf: Sourceforge search
dict: Merriam Webster dictionary
imdb: Imdb

Mozilla Firefox is a great browser, I'm not knocking it, but when I need to do something faster I find Konqueror better suited to the task.

Sun IPC ... a bit more success

I managed to play a bit more with my Sun IPC this evening and despite the fact that the machine has a bad memory chip in the first bank, I managed to learn enough about the machine to determine that the hard drive has Sun OS Release 4.1.4 on it.

I would have liked to continue playing with the box, but it was getting pretty close to midnight and each time I reset the box it cycles through testing the audio device, which gives a nice loud beeeep!

Here's a bit of a transcript of what I managed to discover:

PROM Checksum test
Context Reg Test
Segment Map Test
Sizing Memory
Page Map Test
Page Map Test
Memory Test
Probing Memory Bank #: 1 2 3 4 5
Initializing Auxiliary Register
Reset/Initialize Keyboard
not nvramrc
Setting up Console Parameters
SPARCstation IPC, No keyboard.
ROM Rev. 1.6, 36 MB memory installed, Serial #16777215.
Ethernet address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, Host ID: ffffffff.


The IDPROM checksum is incorrect.
Testing
Testing audio chip; listen for a beep
Synchronous Error Reg Test
Synchronous Virtual Address Reg Test
Asynchronous Error Reg Test
Asynchronous Virtual Address Reg Test
System Enable Reg Test
FPU Test
Memory Test

Type b (boot), c (continue), or n (new command mode)
>n
Type help for more information
ok boot sd(,0,3)

Type 'go' to resume
ok boot sd(,0,3)
Probing Memory Bank #: 1 2 3 4 5
Booting from: sd(0,0,3)
root on sd0d fstype 4.2
Boot: vmunix
Size: 1343488+218408+131992 bytes
Invalid format type in NVRAM
Machine type set to Sun-4/60
SunOS Release 4.1.4 (SUN414) #1: Tue Aug 8 13:22:14 EDT 1995
Copyright (c) 1983-1993, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
mem = 36864K (0x2400000)
avail mem = 34504704
Invalid format code in NVRAM
cpu = Sun 4/40
zs0 at obio 0xf1000000 pri 12
zs1 at obio 0xf0000000 pri 12
fd0 at obio 0xf7200000 pri 11
audio0 at obio 0xf7201000 pri 13
sbus0 at SBus slot 0 0x0
dma0 at SBus slot 0 0x400000
esp0 at SBus slot 0 0x800000 pri 3
sd0 at esp0 target 3 lun 0
sd0:
le0 at SBus slot 0 0xc00000 pri 5
bwtwo0 at SBus slot 3 0x0 pri 7
Cannot open 'sd0d'
root device (fd%d[a-h] sd%d[a-h] ):

I think it's a perfectly cool box!

Linux on an iMac & beginning Sun IPC exploration

This morning was very productive! I installed Ubuntu PowerPC edition on a Cherry iMac (400MHz) donated to The Working Centre and I managed to get a response over a serial connection to my Sun IPC.

The iMac works brilliantly, and compared to Mac OS/X Tiger on a slightly better iMac with more RAM (256MB vs 192MB) Ubuntu wins hands down! Tiger crawls on the other G3.

The Sun IPC is a fascinating little box because it's about the size of a lunch pail. I'm going to buy a NIC for it and use it as an apache web server.

A screen shot of the nvram shot can be found at: http://members.porchlight.ca/charm/img/sparcIPC.png.

Converting flac to mp3

Recently one of my fathers asked me to rip a CD to a high quality format that he could play on his system. I chose flac, the free and lossless audio codec. It seemed like a good choice because I had lots of space (80GB) and Bill tends to be picky about his audio.

Later I found out that it wasn't such a good idea because Bill also wanted to play the files on an mp3 player that accepts mp3's only. No problem I thought, flac is after all a "free" audio codec. What I found was quite a different story. While there were quite a few converters, most of them written in python, most didn't work; then I came across audio-convert.

While audio-convert did require a few extras (zenity, python-vorbis, python-ogg) SuSE 9.3 had all of them. There is no install script so I just added the directory to the local path before using the script:

PATH=$PATH:~/audio-convert-0.2.1

Then I changed into the directory with the .flac files I wanted to convert and typed:

audio-convert *

A few dialog boxes pop up to let you choose what format you want to convert to. Simple simon!