Michelle’s Carpet Bag

All these great new distributed networking ideas keep coming to mind, but most of them get dismissed with the ‘I can’t afford it’ trump. Being a student certainly has it’s advantages, but when it comes to satisfying my interest in expanding my home network, it’s not much fun not having any cash flow.

I’ve recently gotten the itch to build my own PC, as unsatisfied with my desktop as I was. It was a rush purchase years ago just after moving to the UK, changing jobs, & losing access to a company laptop. It was fine for remote-desktop working from home, but everything was painfully slow, thanks to it’s entry-level Vista setup.

After seeing how great Xubuntu performs on the lightweight server I recently set up, I decided to wipe Vista from my PC altogether & try out the newly released Ubuntu beta, Jaunty Jackalope. Imagine my surprise when I looked more closely at the PC that had been slogging along for the last 2 years and noticed that it has an AMD Core 2 Duo 64 processor. The reason I was so surprised is because it never felt like a dual-core processor. In fact, it was noticeably slower than the 7-year-old Dell laptop I still have running XP.

I merrily burned the 64-bit version of Jaunty onto a CD and set to work on installation. After the several-hour-long process I had experienced with my Intrepid install last week (due to the low-spec nature of my lightweight server), I was pleasantly surprised to see the entire process finished in around 20 minutes. But what really knocked my socks off was the boot time. It took 24 seconds to show me a login prompt, and another 12 until I had a full desktop. WOW!

But that’s not all. Everything on my PC is now smoking fast. File system navigation, network access, you name it. Installing new software couldn’t be easier, and setting up automatic file sharing around my network took all of 10 minutes, thanks to sshfs & autofs (helpful instructions here & here).

All this with nothing more than an OS change? I’m still astounded that I’ve managed to upgrade my PC without so much as spending a dime. No extra memory, no processor replacement, absolutely nothing. I didn’t so much as leave the house. This is a sure sign that the times are changing, that ubuntu is not only a serious competitor to Windows, but a superior one. Unless things go horribly wrong, I think I’m converted to open-source for life. You’ve convinced me.

I set up ssh on my new linux box yesterday, but when I tried to log in this morning after a restart, I wasn’t able to. After re-installing ssh and changing all my router settings back, I discovered I couldn’t even ping my box. This was at least a relief since it meant the problem was a network issue, not ssh.

It turns out that my static IP information was getting reset after each reboot. After a little digging, I found a step-by-step fix for this known issue.  It involves disabling the Gnome Network Manager, which is fine by me.

To my delight, after trying out the Twitter API, I found that it only took a few minutes to master. For my purposes, posting updates involves a single curl statement. Wrapping that sucker up in some lightweight perl code couldn’t be easier. In fact, all I had to do was add a line or two to my existing script that posts in a similar way to Pachube.

I’ve added a link on the right to my house’s twitter feed. Not the worst way to spend 10 minutes, that’s for sure.

After a difficult few weeks writing papers and getting very little sleep (more on those later), I finally found time to set up my new Viglen MPC-L. Out of the box, it booted up fine and I was able to connect to my temperamental router after assigning it a static IP and adding a few DNS entries for my ISP. With my network connection up and running, I gave the update manager a whirl.

To my disappointment, the version installed on the MPC (Xubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn) is already out of service and therefore no longer found on the main repository. Annoyed that a brand new box should come with an out-of-date OS, I set to work connecting to the old-releases repository. This managed to update most of my packages, but gave me errors on some and wouldn’t let me upgrade to a newer version.

So instead, I decided to do a fresh install. I haven’t attempted a linux install since my long-forgotten college days, so I figured better late than never.  I grabbed the iso for the latest version of Xubuntu since it’s lightweight enough for such a minimalistic box. I burned it onto a CD using a USB DVD drive after checking the md5sum, and plugged it into the MPC. Booting from the CD wasn’t very successful until I realized that none of the front USB ports are bootable. I was then shown the main screen for the boot disk, but when I tried to install it, I got a scary message about the kernel panicking.

Fortunately, a friend came to my rescue, having seen a similar message during his install. I added the boot option “pci=noacpi” since the MPC hardware isn’t acpi compatible.  This did the trick, and within about 4 hours I was good to go.

The CurrentCost setup itself was significantly less painful than the setup on Vista (no surprise there). It took all of 10 minutes to sort out. I didn’t need to hunt down any drivers; everything was included with Intrepid. The only piece of framework I had to install was the rsmb, which was a tiny download – no extra installation setup besides changing the name of my publishing feed.

I grabbed a copy of the source for talking to the message broker – again a trivial download involving very little setup, and within minutes I was pleased to see my little red graph back in business.

I’ve been wanting to install ubuntu for the last 2 years or so, but I’ve always hesitated to hand over my sole machine to the hands of open source. Now that I finally have an extra box to play with, I can explore the wonders of ubuntu without worrying about important software being unavailable. 

So far I’m duly impressed. Based on my experiences in the last few hours, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance I’ll soon be migrating my main box over to Intrepid. Time will tell….

I confess. My birthday isn’t until the 22nd, but I’ve already opened my brother’s present. And what a good present it is!
If you haven’t picked up a copy, this book should be number one on your next-in-line-to-read list. Or better yet, throw whatever you’re reading right now aside and start this one.
Yes, it’s that good. It’s about murders that occur over TCP/IP. And it’s chock full of interesting tech references that, for once, are fairly accurate.
I also hear there’s a sequel coming out. I haven’t even made it past Chapter 5 of this book and I already can’t wait for the sequel. Yes, it’s that good.
Thanks, Bryce!

I just found a neat little tool that’s not really useful in any way, just a bit of fun. I came across it while browsing through SoulPancake, Rainn Wilson’s new site. It lets you easily create an interesting word collage. Here’s what I put together in all of 2 minutes on wordle.net:

This is a function I need so often, I went in search of a quick and easy way to do it. With only two commands, you can display an accurate word count of your document, creating a pdf along the way & killing two birds with one stone.

The friendly commands are pdflatex and ps2ascii.

Here’s an example of the script I created:

  #!/bin/csh

  set source_file = ./document_name

  # Compile file & create pdf
  pdflatex $source_file.tex > /dev/null
  if ( $? > 0 ) then
    echo "Failed in pdflatex"
    exit 1
  endif

  # Convert pdf to ascii & count number of words
  echo "Word count in $source_file.pdf:"
  ps2ascii $source_file.pdf | wc -w
  if ( $? > 0 ) then
    echo "Failed in ps2ascii"
    exit 1
  endif