From the Orient

I’m not sure why I decided to try out “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ today but I’m glad I did. I’d heard about it on its release (and before in fact, but it didn’t have a name then) of course, and in fact downloaded a disk image of warty.

I’d had a small epiphany at work today and managed to get ssh tunneling working though the firewall and could grab my home email directly from my trusty Debian woody server. I think it gave me a small boost of linuxness that made me try it out.

The main reason for my previous reticence was I could never get my wireless network card to work on any previous variant of Debian. Woody just couldn’t see, and I had so much trouble with Sarge, I gave up.

The whole installation process was flawless. I had to answer a few questions, but they were not questions that the installation process could guess. It did say it couldn’t find my wireless network but I simply entered the required details and it just worked. Roughly twenty minutes of package downloads, a reboot and that was it. A working desktop. Looks nice too.

I am certain that this is the beginning of Linux working as a desktop. The developers have done a marvelous job. I will be installing it on one of my work machines tomorrow. If all goes well, I’ll have a go at installing on my laptop.

Just a few issues to sort out. Getting Firefox 1.0 (it comes with 0.9.3), finding and installing printer drivers, and getting the dual boot system to start with Windows XP so that the kids can play their games.

By kids I mean me, and by games I mean Half Life 2 which appears to be lacking a Ubuntu version.

Last night, I spent a futile few hours trying to get X Windows installed on my machine. After a while, I found the answer, or rather the problem, via Google.

My MVidia GeForce 3 graphics card is not compatible with the XFree86 system, or more specifically the device drivers that are provided with the system. Felix provides a great explanation and steps to get round the problem, but I’ve run into further problems trying to apply it.

First off, when trying to make the driver kernel module, I got a message saying that my gcc compiler was different from that which compiled my kernel (or something like that; it is all a little vague to me this morning. I’ll have to try again tonight). Felix explains that I might have to recompile my kernel to get round this. Sounded scary. I can’t even get to first base on this because I can’t find the debian source.

I suppose I’ll have to get this downloaded, but for that I’ll have to networking sorted out. It was very late when debian couldn’t find my ethernet card, so I gave up.

UPDATE: Another link to getting the GeForce3 driver to work

Developing a Linux command-line utility [via Disobey Nonsense Network]. This will come in most useful as do a number of repetitive tasks on my Linux box at the moment and need to learn how to make the procedures more automated.

To get the new blog roll working, I have to set a cron job up to run my Python code once an hour. This link is my crib sheet as I know nothing about it. It is particularly relevent as as I’m an Oracle DBA. It could have been written for me.