Google Earth

Fab! Must admit that I had previously searched for Google Earth for Linux and been saddened that I couldn't get it. Looks like the latest version (currently in beta) 4 is available for Linux, Mac and (good old reliable - [splutter]) Windows.

It's only a simple wget away:
wget http://dl.google.com/earth/GE4/GoogleEarthLinux.bin
sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin

Or, if you'd prefer, just browse to http://dl.google.com/earth/GE4/GoogleEarthLinux.bin in your favorite browser and then run it after download.

Have fun (it's about 20Mb)

PSA Total Backup

I have been having issues for a couple of days with the following error.

Encountered error when do_backup is already running. Backup cannot start twice! on host k*****.*****k.ltd.uk at 2006-12-18 4:8:2

I presume that the problem pretty much described in the error. A quick search on the 4PSA forums gave me a simple solution. "I have noticed this too on occastion, but haven't found out why is happens. Simply kill the process and re-run the backup".

Finding the process by name wasn't something I'd done before... google came to the rescue again.

:~$ ps -A |grep do_backup
27524 03:02:12 do_backup

So, all I needed to do was kill the process id that was returned and re-run the backup!

:~$ sudo kill 27524

Great - all you ever need in this life is a couple minutes, a firefox browser and google!

Slimserver

I've just bought myself a squeezebox and am loving it. Getting the slimserver setup wasn't quite as simple as it might have been given that there is an ubuntu package for it and you'd imagine it's therefore only an apt-get away.

Add the slimerserver repository to your sources.list file (/etc/apt/sources.list)

deb http://debian.slimdevices.com testing main

Then update the repositories and install the slimserver software:

sudo apt-get update
apt-get build-essential
sudo apt-get install slimserver

Restart the machine and voila, after pointing my firefox browser to IP:9000, it was time to play with some features.

It might be helpful to know that on a ubuntu system, the slimserver software lives in [/usr/share/slimserver]. To install plugins, simply drop them into the plugins folder and browse to the slimserver where they appear ready for configuration.

If you want all the BBC content you can get your hands on... AlienBBC:
http://www.x2systems.com/AlienBBC/installation.html#linux
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17015

Beryl working

Well, I am amazed to say that without too much trouble (thanks to a handy how to), the beta nvidia drivers are installed and I have Beryl running in GNOME. It is very cool, although I have needed to switch off the wobbly windows - they were doing my head in!

Have fun.

Terminal back

Finally, my gnome terminal is back. I don't know if any other users found that after their Edgy install, the gnome terminal didn't work, but mine just didn't start. It would try its best, but played with itself for about 5 seconds before dying and disappearing. I've been relying on eterm for the last couple of weeks and haven't enjoyed it as much.

It would seem as if the bug has been fixed though, 'cos it works now. :o)

Beryl

I'd never really heard of it until I stumbled across it today. Beryl is a windows manager that adds a bunch of eye-candy (best seen in a movie: youtube). It works with GNOME and KDE and it would appear, works with twinview and xinerama too (another youtube movie).

I'm going to need the new nvidia drivers to get this working (and I imagine some time and patience too) but it does look uber-cool.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=263851

Twinview and Xinerama

I've been having a play (in the midst of studying for exams)!

I wasn't really all that sure about the difference between two terms that I had heard banded about with relation to Dual Head displays: Twinview and Xinerama.

It would appear that while an X server can happily support several screens that aren't linked, Xinerama allows a 'virtual' screen that spans both physical screens (or more, if you are particularly lucky) whereas Twinview was originally a workaround created by nvidia in the days before windows managers and X properly supported more than one monitor. That, at least is my limited understanding of the subject.

I had been running 2 19" TFTs at 1280x1024 in Xinerama using an nVidia 6200 DH. Although, not the speediest card in the world, it was managing admirably, but on occasion, was known to stutter and spit at the thought of having to move windows about.

After some reading some interesting posts on the subject of performance, I decided to try and see if Twinview would be more efficient. Helpfully, xorg.conf examples abound and I was able to tweak my xorg.conf file and without too much trouble, switch from xinerama to twinview.

I was surprised by the significant performance improvement. The next test will be trying to install the new beta nvidia drivers and beryl!

xorg.conf below:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the /etc/X11/xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man /etc/X11/xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Single screen"
Screen 0 "Screen" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/truetype"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/X11"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "GLcore"
Load "i2c"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "type1"
Load "vbe"
EndSection

## I N P U T D E V I C E S ##

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

## M O N I T O R S ##

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "F-419-Left"
Option "DPMS"
DisplaySize 386 290
HorizSync 30-82
VertRefresh 40-60
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "F-419-Right"
Option "DPMS"
DisplaySize 386 290
HorizSync 30-82
VertRefresh 40-60
EndSection

## D E V I C E S ##

Section "Device"
Identifier "Nvidia6200"
BoardName "GeForce 6200"
BusID "1:0:0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "nVidia"
Option "TwinView" "yes"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "CRT-1 RightOf CRT-0"
EndSection

## S C R E E N S ##

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen"
Device "Nvidia6200"
Monitor "F-419-Right"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Group 0
Mode 0666
EndSection

Edgy Eft

Every morning this week has been met with a significant number of updates screaming for immediate installation and thanks to the handy updates manager, it hasn't been a chore. The reason, of course, for the glut of new packages and fixes is the release of Edgy Eft. The RC has been out for a week now and final release is upon us.

I've had no problems with the updates on my freshly installed desktop machine. I'll have to try a dist-upgrade on my backup server and see if it breaks!

Gnomebaker burnt!

It would appear that the default installation of GnomeBaker doesn't exactly "work".

apt-get install gnomebaker

While, this helpfully downloaded the aforementioned, installed it and created links to it in the Applications menu, trying to write a CD or DVD doesn't work. It would appear that there are some permissions errors and the app can't get access to the drive :o(. Running the app as root using sudo gnomebaker does work, but is hardly a workable solution in the long term!

I'll continue to browse the forum and blogs for some helpful hints, but at the moment, it seems to be: run it using sudo.

Beautiful fonts

To get the fonts on Edgy looking fab, it just takes a second to copy the folloing text to a blank file and save it as .fonts.conf in your home directory (/home/username/)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Edgy Eft

I decided that with Knot 3 hitting the shelves at Ubuntu, I would take the plunge and install it. Sure, it's a development branch and will be inherently unstable, but I reckon that it will be a good experience to install it, check out some of the new features and report some bugs.

My system spec is as follows:

• AMD 64 3200 (Venice core)
• 2 GB Corsair RAM
• 200G Seagate SATA hard-drive
• nVidia GeForce 6200 graphics - dual head
  

Installing Linux has never been simpler. Download your CD image, burn it to CD and pop it in the drive. Restart your machine and wait for the CD to boot (making sure that your BIOS is setup to boot from CD!).

You get presented with a Ubuntu desktop and an "install" icon and after answering some normal setup questions, the installer gets to work, partitioning and installing. My first problem came at restart with this bug:

BUG: Soft lockup detected on !CPU#0

After the machine was restarted manually :o( it booted double quick - we are still waiting for the splash screen so I had to read the log entries during the boot sequence.

Given that I have a GeForce 6200 nVidia card with dual head capabilities and 2 19" flat panels, it would be nice to use them! After getting them to work many times in the past, all it took was a quick apt-get nvidia-glx and copy and pasting my xorg.conf from this blog post. A simple gdm restart with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace later and I'm presented with the nVidia splashscreen and a beautiful Xinerama login screen.

We're in production at the moment, so it was hardly surprising that updates were available for me to install - simple procedure with the update manager and no problems yet.

Following the updates another restart was required and the same bug as above was encountered. I was returned to my desktop to set it up how I like - I would post a screenshot, but the handy screenshot utility is only grabbing half the screen!

First real problem arrived after the restart - trying to load the terminal didn't work. It started to load and ended up quiting before opening up the window... it's a pain, but not a deal braker, I'll just use the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1). I copied by backup files back to my Edgy machine and distributed them to their correct locations.

The final part of the upgrade was to get my must have pieces of software installed. To be honest, most are installed by default:

• Firefox
• Evolution
• Gain
• OpenOffice
• Gimp

Some however, like my favorite music player (Muine) are not. For this, I needed to add the Universe repository, which is much simpler in Edgy than it was in Dapper (just an obvious tick box in Synaptic). Then searched for muine and added it and all it's handy plugins, gstreamer0.8-mad and gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 for mp3 playback and a great piece of sync software, unison.

And that was it... only took about an hour, which I think has been my quickest reinstall of a system EVER.

I synced the backup repositories with my local machine to ensure that I had all the backups in place and gave unison the chance to create its archives. Copying the 8000+ mp3 files took a little longer than anything else I wanted to do, so the machines got the opportunity to do it overnight!

Ubuntu AMD64 Firefox

A couple of the things that you really want from the internet (on occasion), don't work with the default firefox install from a 64 ubuntu deployment. The two main dealbrakers are flash and java. Real media would be nice, but there are ways round that problem.

I found a nice answer to the problem at the ubuntu forum.

File synchronization

I've been searching for a linux based utility that will allow me to synchronise my files. It needs to be able to act as a backup utility and also as a sync utility for my laptop.

I finally found Unison which is only an "apt-get install" step away from Ubuntu users. If you are using unison, the config files are kept in ~/.unison

Running unison is pretty simple and like all good software, it works simply out of the box but provides plenty of advanced features for those who are interested and read the documentation!

Unison notices when you do your first sync and mentions it to you. It then runs through the directory contents and checks that you want to sync it. If you have a directory called scripts and want to sync it with a backup directory called backup, the two examples below show how you would sync local and remote directories.

unison scripts backup
unison scripts ssh://server//path/to/scripts

You'll be prompted for authentication and then all is the same as before. It has to be said that constantly typing paths does get tedious and you can therefore create a config file and place it within the .unison directory. For this example, create a file called scripts.prf:

# You must have exactly 2 root declarations
root = scripts
root = ssh://server//path/to/scripts

# If you wish to ignore files
ignore = Name .*
# ignores all files starting with . - ie. hidden files and directories

To execute the newly saved script, run:

unison scripts

There are many other repositries of information related to unison, such as in-depth discussion and the user manual

Plesk and spam

I have been having problems with spam on my hosted server running Plesk. I had shelled out the extra cash for the psa-spamassassin addon, thinking that it would make my life easier. Trouble was that the spamassassin implementation was neither easy to manage or all that sensitive.

After reading around, I realised I needed to add some rules and did so using RulesDuJour. Things improved, but I ended up adding too many rule sets and killing the CPU. Excess rules were removed from /etc/spamassassin and the list was pruned.

#!/bin/bash# Version 1.21
# IMPORTANT! Edit the TRUSTED_RULESETS line to choose yourRuleSets
TRUSTED_RULESETS="
SARE_CODING
SARE_HEADER
SARE_SPECIFIC
EVILNUMBERS
SARE_ADULT
SARE_BML
SARE_FRAUD
SARE_SPOOF
SARE_STOCKS
SARE_OEM
SARE_OBFU
SARE_RANDOM
SARE_GENLSUBJ
SARE_REDIRECT
SARE_UNSUB";
SA_DIR="/etc/mail/spamassassin";
MAIL_ADDRESS="support@humblehosting.co.uk";
SINGLE_EMAIL_ONLY="true";
SA_LINT="spamassassin --lint";
SA_RESTART="/etc/init.d/psa-spamassassin";
WGET="wget -N";
PERL="perl";
MAILCMD="mail";
GREP="grep";
RULES_DU_JOUR_SCRIPT="/usr/local/sbin/rules_du_jour";
#### End Local Settings ####

I was still irritated by the difficultly of easily managing the spam settings of individual accounts using the Plesk plugin and turned to 4psa who offter a separate spamassassin implementation (Spam Guardian) which has far superior administration on an admin/client and per-domain basis.

Now everything is setup and working well with great administration and some stats too.

Plesk and open_basedir

I'm using Plesk as a virtual server solution and have had some quesitons about accessing files outwith the vhosts home httpdocs directory.

This is not possible as default using Plesk. You need to override the open_basedir restriction by placing a file called vhost.conf in the /var/www/vhosts/**domain.com**/conf / directory.

<directory>
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/**domain**/httpdocs:/tmp:***directory/***"
</directory>

Save it and then restart the appropriate services with:

sudo /opt/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -v -a

You also need to ensure that the domain has PHP safe mode switched off:

Menu -> Domains -> domain.com -> Setup
uncheck the safe mode box (near the bottom of the page)

This will create configuration files for all domains and restart the appropraite services.

Hosting solution

I have been looking around for an appropriate hosting solution to use. I want to set up a server to allow clients to host domains. There are several examples of opensource and commercial software that offer such a facility. I tried a couple and decided that above all, stability was paramount. A close second came security and thirdly and very importantly, ease of use and customer satisfaction.

It boiled down to two solutions, cPanel (which I have used before) and Plesk. And... I decided on the latter. I'm afraid to say that I don't really have any evidence related to which is better - I think I just preferred the examples and demonstration implementations of Plesk.

SSH tunnel

I needed to connect to a remote Postgres server and the serveradmin was appropriately reluctant to open up post 5432.

Simple solution was to create an ssh tunnel. I'm running a Postgres server locally, so I didn't want to forward port 5432 to the remote machine.

ssh -L5431:localhost:5432 server.with.the.postgres.db

Postgres 7.4

Another small fix for the installation of Postgres 7.4 on Ubuntu Dapper.

After installation and setting up users and a default database, psql got me into the terminal, but I couldn't connect from PgAdminIII.

I tried to connect to the localhost with:

psql -h localhost

This failed, because as default, the TCP/IP socket is set to false. The simple fix is to edit the config file and ensure that the port is set to 5432 and the tcpip_socket is set to true.

sudo pico /etc/postgresql/7.4/main/postgresql.conf
...
port = 5432
tcpip_socket = true

Postgres setup

Installing Postgres isn't a problem using apt-get but setting up the first user and database had me foxed for a while.

First create a postgres user and database with your username. When using psql, you will open a database with your username as default, so its easier to create the table with your username at the start.

~$ sudo su postgres -c createuser yourusername
~$ sudo su postgres -c createdb yourusername

Now connect to your postgres database and alter the password the user that has just been created.

~$ sudo su postgres -c psql yourusername
=# ALTER USER yourusername WITH PASSWORD 'yourpassword';
=# \q

Don't forget the terminating ; in the SQL call. I found these helpful hints in the postgres manual for version 8.0:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/user-manag.html

Dbase, PHP and Ubuntu

I needed to have PHP compiled with dBase for webdevelopment. dBase was dropped from the standard libraries of Ubuntu at version 5.04 and I couldn't find any solution for installing PHP with dBase support.

I don't imagine this will help the community much, but I had a specific need and finally worked out the solution. Its here mainly for my sanity should I need to replicate it in the future.

NB. It will work for the installation and removal of other PHP components.

Install some packages you'll need later on:

sudo apt-get install shtool dpkg-dev

Download the PHP source file

sudo apt-get source php5

We need to alter the rules to allow PHP compilation with dBase support.

Enter the new PHP directory
Edit the rules file ./debian/rules
Change the COMMON_CONFIG statement
add: "--enable-dbase \"

Now we need to build dependancies and then build PHP. The building of the dependancies requires a significant download and the PHP build tends to take a fair amount of time.

sudo apt-get build-dep php5
sudo dpkg-buildpackage

Once this has finally finished, the .deb files will have been created - if they aren't in the current directory try it's parent.

The final job is to install the new PHP library, copy it to the apache modules folder and then restart apache.

sudo dpkg -i php5*.deb
sudo cp ~/php5-*/apache2-build/libs/libphp5.so /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Apache setup

I also want to be able to setup several virtual hosts on this machine, mainly for testing purposes. I want localhost to point to my website and localccc to point to my local version of www.carrubbers.org which is going to be a testbench.

I didn't want to have the document root as stipulated in the default setup and therefore needed to change the document root and directory definition in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default. For clarities sake, I also renamed it!

Secure email

A nice example of Thunderbird, Enigmail and GnuPG to provide secure and encrypted email.

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/secure_email?page=0%2C0

nVidia working

It didn't take that long to get my nVidia card working in beautiful Xinerama. All I did was to install nvidia-glx using apt-get and then altered the "nv" instances in my xorg.conf to "nvidia".

My current working xorg.conf:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the /etc/X11/xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man /etc/X11/xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi"
FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
EndSection

Section "Module"
# Load "GLcore"
Load "i2c"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
# Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
# Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "type1"
Load "vbe"
EndSection

## I N P U T D E V I C E S ##

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

## M O N I T O R S ##

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "F-419-Left"

Option "DPMS"
Option "CalcAlgorithm" "CheckDesktopGeometry"
DisplaySize 386 290
HorizSync 30-82
VertRefresh 40-60
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "F-419-Right"

Option "DPMS"
Option "CalcAlgorithm" "CheckDesktopGeometry"
DisplaySize 386 290
HorizSync 30-82
VertRefresh 40-60
EndSection

## D E V I C E S ##

Section "Device"
Identifier "NvidiaDH-Left"

BoardName "GeForce 6200"
BusID "1:0:0"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "hwcursor" "off"
Screen 0
VendorName "nVidia"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "NvidiaDH-Right"

BoardName "GeForce 6200"
BusID "1:0:0"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "hwcursor" "off"
Screen 1
VendorName "nVidia"
EndSection

## S C R E E N S ##

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen-Left"

Monitor "F-419-Left"
Device "NvidiaDH-Left"

DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 32
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen-Right"

Monitor "F-419-Right"
Device "NvidiaDH-Right"

DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 32
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

## S E R V E R L A Y O U T #

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout[all]"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
Option "Clone" "off"
Option "Xinerama" "on"
Screen "Screen-Left"
Screen "Screen-Right" RightOf "Screen-Left"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Group "video"
Mode 0660
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
EndSection

Zend Studio library problem

As expected, difficulties emerged when trying to install Zend studio on my new AMD64 Ubuntu 6.06 installation.

awk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open shared object
... Launching installer ...
grep: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory/tmp/install.dir.17548/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The solution though was simple.

$ cp ZendStudio-5_2_0.bin ZendStudio-5_2_0.bin.bak
$ cat ZendStudio-5_2_0.bin.bak sed "s/export \ LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > \ ZendStudio-5_2_0.bin

For some reason, I also had to do the same on the ZDE binary after installation. The following should work assuming you chose the default location for zend installation:

$ cd /usr/local/Zend/ZendStudioClient-5.2.0/bin$ cp ZDE ZDE.bak
$ cat ZDE.bak sed "s/export \ LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > ZDE$ rm ZDE.bak

Ubuntu 6.06 64AMD

I've just finished building my new AMD64 machine and the latest version of Ubuntu is being installed as a type (on my old machine). I anticipate to run into the usual problems but I think I have solutions to the expected ones already.

Graphics - I have an nVidia 6600 dual-head graphics card and it never works out of the box. My xorg.conf will doubtless need some tweaking to get it working.

PHP - as a developer of http://www.carrubbers.org/ I have the requirement of having php compiled with dbase. There isn't a nice .deb package to allow me to do a simple apt-get install.

Zend - I had Zend Studio and Server setup on my old machine and I remember a rather tedious process of getting them to play with each other.

Firefox - from reading other posts, it looks like flash and realaudio won't work in a firefox implementation under AMD64.

I'll post how I get on.

Transitions

In December 2004, I took the plunge and installed Linux on my home machine.

This was SUSE9 and I very much enjoyed our honeymoon together. My initial exploration was with KDE and once I upgraded to SUSE10 I had tried and tested many applications and had a trusted few installed.

I still hadn't really tried out the Gnome desktop and with Ubuntu hitting the streets, I took the plunge and tried out another distro. I am happy to say that I have stuck with it and how have a 6.06 64bit installation and two 6.06 server installations that are very stable and easy to manage.

There have, of course, been bumps along the way and this blog will hopefully answer the questions that I asked myself. Most of all, it will act as a repository of information I may need when I upgrade or reinstall.